I don't understand why no one's put a link for Cheapass Games, which I also heartily recommend. There's loads of creativity, and if you only liked one game out of five, it'd still be better value for money than buying a typically priced game. And believe me, you'll like more than one out of five.
The Cheapass game most like the sort of "civilization development" games you described is probably One False Step for Mankind.
The parent to this made the observation that whether people would like a Live CD depends on who they are.
In light of that, I would like to add my voice against the tide of the "don't do that, it's stupid" comments.
The question wasn't: "Should I send a Live CD with my Christmas cards?" "Are my friends going to appreciate a Live CD?" "What are alternatives to sending a Live CD?"
Let's let trustedserf, who probably knows the people on his/her Christmas list better than we do, make the call of what to do for Christmas, and stick to offering some useful comment on the various distros out there.
I lurked through these posts because my mom's computer is in the shop because it collapsed under the weight of virii and spyware, so she'd appreciate a CD that let her surf and/or recover data when Windows is conked out. I didn't expect I'd be wading through a lot of comments from people pretending to know trustedserf's friends better than he/she does.
Ditto for the pop-up crash in 1.0PR, which made amusements like Project Rockstar unusable. I am _so_ glad it's gone in 1.0.
Of course, for me that was in Linux -- Firefox 1.0PR in Windows had a few differences from the Linux version (and didn't, as far as I could tell, have the popup crash).
That said, I haven't had any problems with Firefox 1.0 on either the Windows or Linux machines. But I might not qualify as a high-intensity user.
If I only had the time! Niggling things like work keep pulling me away...
On a more serious note, on the scale of addictions, gameaholism has got to be one of the least worrisome. Possible health effects? I can come up with eyestrain and RSI, which don't hold a candle to health risks from smoking or drinking. Social effects? Possible (and I know this is _very_ arguable) social isolation, as opposed to secondhand smoke, or all the potential trouble that public drunkenness can lead to.
Lastly, I'll go out on a limb and say that all subjects of addiction serve one or more purposes for the user. For example, alcohol is a significant element in our social fabric, in addition to having potentially appealing chemical effects. Even a game-hater has to admit that games can be a means of anonymous communication, mindless entertainment, stress relief, and external validation. Some of us would claim that games can have much more important benefits than that, encouraging creativity and critical thinking being obvious examples.
Maybe time would be better spent thinking about addictions in general, and what if anything society needs to do about them, instead of picking a bogeyman du jour to vilify?
The QuickPad by H45 Technologies (www.quickpad.com or www.h45.com, review here) seems to be a similar product, and certainly seems to meet your requirements.
I haven't used mine as much as I expected -- I don't know if they've got newer models, but mine has audible keyboard clicks, and I find I don't write LaTeX as fast by keyboard as I can write math, so plain paper is better for me for taking notes. Nonetheless, I've never had a serious problem with it, when I talked to their tech support (about a minor memory thing -- it acted like it had less than it did) they were outrageously helpful and actually solved the problem over the phone.
Light, convenient, don't have to worry about software incompatibilities (it "uploads" by pretending you're typing now, rather than when you did)...worth looking at.
Hopefully, this article is old enough that there won't be a significant/. effect...
I've been playing 3rd ed. D&D over a blog, and it's been working out awfully well.
We've got some downtime at the moment, since the DM's on vacation, but generally, it's been a very active blog. And the blog format allows people with real jobs to play, even if they're geographically separated. (I'm in a different country from the rest of the group.)
I thought that this would satisfy my long-suffering D&D jones, and it almost does -- but now I want to start my own campaign. Once a DM, always a control freak, I suppose.:)
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
Did you read the same article I did? I didn't see anywhere that Katz said that drone wars are less moral than other wars. Or that he didn't like smart weapons. He made an observation, and wondered what it bodes for the future.
But, since you bring it up, the issue is not: should we fight this war in a new high-tech way that causes less casualties, or an old and brutal way that causes more casualties and heartbreak. Instead, one concern about the development of "Drone Wars" might be: if war doesn't have consequences for us, why not fight?
There are opportunities for war that aren't taken, partly because the cost is too great. What would be the result if there was no cost? Would we just forget about all that expensive diplomacy and have nation-states with no more complicated relationships than football teams? If so, what would that world be like?
Personally, a more important concern is not "when everyone fights with machines, what'll happen" but rather "if _we_ fight with machines, how will the other guy respond?" I think that there will be have-nots for the foreseeable future, and how they respond to "the new war" matters more in the short run.
Terrorism is a result of desperation and powerlessness, with some rage and psychosis thrown in. I imagine that terrorists feel this way: There is a giant power is oppressing them, destroying them, and they must strike back. But they don't have the tanks or planes or the subs to take on that power. So they use the hammer they've got (bombs, hijackings), and they hit the place they can do the most damage (civilians.) Maybe then the giant power will think or care about what it's doing to them, and stop crushing them.
When we declared a war on terrorism, I suspect that Al Qaeda was thrilled. If they could have gone to war with us in a conventional way, instead of terrorism, they would have. Finally they were taken seriously enough to go toe-to-toe with America. I imagine some of them were hopeful that they would finally get to fight with Americans, and kill American soldiers.
But they didn't really have the chance. The Americans were like (nearly) unseen aliens, sending precise destruction down from the skies. They mostly didn't see an American to shoot at.
So, what message does that send? Even when the opportunity for conventional war comes up, it is unbalanced: they get killed and we don't. If you felt that our government was exterminating you or your way of life, what could you do about it? I'm concerned that the war against terrorism will convince many people that terrorism is the only way left to them to wage war against us.
That's one of the parts of this research that I heard about first. (Carl Wieman is my dad's cousin.) Not only were they able to get colder than anyone had been before, they were able to do it in a way that most research laboratories could replicate. Apparently cryogenic research has been "opened to the masses", so to speak.:)
A thought that this comment gave me was "why do people make web pages?" Personal ones, that is. I've seen amateur journalism, fan sites, etc., that took hours of learning and labor. And people put them out there for everyone to look at and, hopefully, benefit from.
Some elaboration:
People make web pages to express themselves. To spread information they think is important. To let others know who they are. To conveniently provide something to people they know (family photos, for example.) Because they want to learn how to use an exciting new technology.
I think all these reasons apply equally well to open source software. Of course, there are other reasons too, but I think perhaps the analogy might make "average people" think about it from a new perspective.
An interesting collection of essays, with references to D&D and moral panics, is "The Satanism Scare". (I forget the editors.) Despite the name, these are essays analyzing various elements of the interest in Satanism during the '80's (remember those Geraldo episodes?) I found them an interesting investigation of a brief media panic, that has left only vague and uncertain memories for most people, of the "wasn't there something about some kid who (insert disturbing behavior or tragedy here)" variety.
I agree with your sentiment. While the DMCA technically protects "effective" copy protection measures, and to me that means the measure has to actually prevent someone from being able to make readable copies, the DMCA specifically mentions encryption, which could include practically anything.
This was a problem I had with the DVD issue: in principle, I could make an exact copy of a DVD, and it would still play on any DVD player. A lock that every player has a key to isn't an "effective" lock.
Now, I might back down in the case of DVD's, because the DVD-R's you can buy are pre-burned so you can't copy the encryption key, and so the encryption combined with the control of the production of "crippled" recordable discs is an effective measure (although it's not solely electronic.)
In any case, it becomes a burden on the user that they have to demonstrate that the "encryption" isn't an effective means of copy prevention, which permits copyright holders to use stupid schemes to restrict fair use and overstrengthen their copyright privileges, depending on the high cost of litigation to keep users from fighting back.
Is translation into another language encryption? (The Navajo language was used as code in WWII, so it can be used to prevent copies from being understandable.) If I cook up a jury-rigged Babelfish (I think I'll call it "Barneyfish") to convert my book to Welsh, and sell the book, with Barneyfish, so you non-Welsh speakers can read it, can I sue you for DMCA violations if you use Babelfish, or some other automatic translator, instead of Barneyfish? After all, if you make a copy of the book, it's still all Welsh to you, unless you use Barneyfish or some "circumvention device."
(As a side note, what if you have your Aunt Gladys, who knows Welsh, read it to you? Is she circumventing the copy protection? Surely this is fair use. If the DMCA allows the big bad copyright holders to sue poor old Aunt Gladys, it must be a bad law.)
I don't think I know enough to give a complete answer. When you say your IP agreement says you have to sign over any inventions, does that mean that the company has any rights to any inventions you make while working for them? If so, it's not clear to me that they'd need your signature on anything that agrees that their patent application is valid. (They might not feel this way, of course.)
If your IP agreement says that you have to sign whatever document they hand to you regarding patents, etc., then you're pretty much stuck, although I wouldn't feel too bad claiming that at least one of my signatures can't really be legally binding in that case.
It seems to me that you could sign a document that says, essentially, "I contributed in the invention of X, and did so while under IP agreement with the company." I don't know about the intricacies of the law and patent applications, but in the abstract, your question implies that it seems to you that they're claiming more rights than they deserve, from an invention you contributed to.
You shouldn't (I use shouldn't in the "my sense of morals and logic" sense, since I don't know if the law agrees with me here) have to assert that the rights the company is claiming are appropriate; you probably do have to indicate that whatever rights they claim, they are claiming because you (and your coworkers) invented the thing while working at the company, so the company is justified in applying for a patent at all.
If, as your post indicates, you're not working for them any more, you might be able to talk to them and work something out: that is, you might be able to agree to something you're comfortable with, such as, "the actual device (or whatever) in this patent application (or a particular example of such a thing) is in fact the one designed in part by me while working at the company, and therefore is the company's to patent. I do not necessarily subscribe to any claims as to the breadth of application or scope of this device (or whatever) in the patent application."
The company may be troublesome, but if your IP agreement was like the few I've seen, it doesn't seem to me like you're claiming rights to IP that you ceded in your agreement, so I don't think they should be able to successfully sue you for breach of contract. All you're doing is saying that the patent application was written up by patent lawyers, not you, and that they are willing to claim more than you would if it was your patent to apply for, which it isn't.
This seems to me to satisfy everybody; your conscience is clear, because you haven't legally claimed something you don't believe. The patent office, probably, won't care what you think and will approve the patent anyway, and so the company will get what they want too.
Of course, this won't change anything as far as IP being abused by big companies to beat up on little guys, but the question wasn't "What can I do to fight the IP Man?", the answer to which is probably buried in every Patent article on Slashdot.
Some friends of mine and I have been talking about intelligent moderation schemes, in terms of individual interest. Slashdot's moderation works pretty well, as far as it goes. But out on the news servers, you've got a truckload of information in a tankerload of waste, and that's in the topics you're interested in.
Having a good personal assessment scheme without asking me to categorize (a little bot that watches me read, and guesses how much interest I have based on time spent reading, which titles start me reading, and a real simple subjective scale at the end, a "1 to 10, how'd you like this post?"). The little AI tries to make connections -- are my preferences author based? Topic/keyword? Length? Flame content? And develops an evolving rating scheme. If it was successful, pretty soon I'd trust that I could ignore everything rated 2 and below, and spend less time surfing and more time getting information.
Of course, the idea applies to weblogs, too. Generally speaking, any filter that got rid of stuff that I consider crap, without me having to figure out WHY it's crap, would be enormously handy.
I'm just a little feller. I don't post early and often, I'm not 1337, and I've only read half of the DMCA.
But I'm standing up with you. And Jon and Rob. I hope the book spreads some consciousness about the almost-timeless problem of adolescence, how rough it is for most people, and how most people cope with it okay without losing their sanity, and what can help them make it through instead of making it harder.
I think it is a good thing, and is the right thing, and I salute the people who went to the effort of doing it. From the kids brave enough to tell the world about their pain and humiliation, to the folks at Andover (who are NOT going to make a lot of money at this, I expect), to Jon and Rob, who also endure more pain and humiliation than they should have to.
Now here's my two cents on the intellectual property mess.
It seems that lots of people on/. take IP seriously. Whether it's software patents or click-through licenses or copy protection or GPL, there's a lot of posts and a lot of argument about it. I know it's a topic that I think is interesting and important.
Now, I'm not as rabidly paranoid as some others, so I think that Jon and Rob are not cleverly scheming to use other people's work for their own devious purposes. I expect that most of the stories published are: - not from the people whining about their rights to their posts - from people who wanted to tell their story, and would be honored to have it more widely published - quite possibly fair use.
But I don't know, and neither does almost anyone who's posted about it. Therefore, maybe we should wait until it comes out and see if anyone whose work is published feels like their rights have been infringed before we unleash all our righteous rage. There are things Jon has said that I've thought were inaccurate conclusions, but that hardly seems reason to presume that this book is going to have infringing material in it that the copyright owner's going to be upset about.
In the this-isn't-the-law-but-it's-what-I-think-is-right category, I don't think anyone's going to make a lot of profit from this. So I don't really feel that anyone's liable to benefit overmuch from someone else's talent. And the only situation that I can imagine someone getting hurt from their post being published is if they sent to Slashdot expecting that no one they knew would read it, and when it is published as a book, someone does read it and is able to identify them, and they didn't want anyone they knew to read it. But this seems somewhat unlikely. No undue benefit, probably no undue harm -- in my little world, there's no foul.
And if in your little world, there's some horrible moral lapse or negligence that _might_ be going on, maybe hold judgement and a little trust that the good guys we know and love are doing a good job, until you see the end product?
I've wanted to ask a question regarding this for a while. Maybe this forum isn't being read much anymore, and no one will reply, but...
My reading of the DMCA, regarding copy protection, can be summarized by "If it requires a key, then it's locked. If you get past a lock without using the key, then you broke in." That is, as you quoted, if you normally need something with the authority of the copyright holder to get access, then that's a measure that controls access, and the DMCA makes evading such measures illegal, in general.
I think, this is not supposed to mean something like the language the work is in, or the means by which it is stored. Most digital media stores the information in 1's and 0's, and I have to apply something to decode it and make it readable (gain access), like a CD player, disk drive, etc. However, these aren't processes or treatments that have anything to do with the copyright owner.
Specifically mentioned as a technological measure controlling access to a work is encryption.
My question is: does DVD encoding really fit the general definition? In particular, the DVD decoding that takes place in the DVD player is licensed or something from the MPAA, but they don't hold the copyright to any particular DVD movie. Is their licensing of the decoding stuff "with the authority of the copyright holder?"
It seems to me that the idea is, if normally I need a key from the copyright holder, then that's a measure controlling access to the work. In this case, I don't really need a key from the copyright holder, I just need a DVD player. The copyright holder didn't give me anything separate from the work to gain access.
The counterargument, I think, would run like this. I don't know if this is true in fact, so please let me know. The MPAA gives decoding keys to DVD player manufacturers, with the authority of the copyright holder in some way. Effectively, the manufacturers get the key in advance for a multitude of copyrighted materials (the DVDs.) And, the DVD encoding isn't just how the media is stored, since I can change the encoding so that some manufacturers' keys work and some don't.
My counter-counterargument, which isn't legal and maybe childish, is that the "with the authority of the copyright holder" business ought to require more of the copyright holder themselves. I totally understand copy protection by, say, including a CD key or something, so that you need to use something else you got from the copyright holder (the key) to get to the work. DVD encoding is included in my player, and I don't have to apply anything other than the media itself to get access to it. If I were to make an exact duplicate of the DVD, I could give it to my friend (violating the copyright), and we could both play it. I wouldn't have to copy a key to be typed in, or run a decryption program that came with the DVD, or otherwise apply something from the copyright holder to gain access to the work.
Anyone with an opinion on any of these points of view, either from a personal feeling standpoint or a "this is how I think the law is meant to be interpreted" way, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Bulletproof install: works if you know the configuration ahead of time. Barring that, the RH 6.1 install didn't hassle ME any. Win95 installs were usually fine, but I've had them go south on me. Not fun.
Getting rid of stuff: No one seems to complain about the MS Dos prompt option, which is still on Win98 (I haven't seen 2k). Stripping stuff that you already have that is being adopted by others (separate user profiles in Netscape, Windows, etc.) is marketing suicide. Like you say, "power users" can know and use the cryptic command lines to get stuff quick. The GUI idea succeeded because normal users don't need the intricacy, but need the usual operations to be easy and impossible to forget. GNOME's explorer utility, and in fact all those GTK apps, are the beginning. I think it might surprise some of us how satisfied "granny" can be with a GNOME desktop with some handy icons in the taskbar.
The GUI must be slick: Everyone is for this, but I don't actually think it's a big deal. The GUI is supposed to be easier than typing. Easier in terms of knowledge and simplicity. That's it. I guess that ease-of-use, but easiest to use is awfully close to Macs: one button, one purpose, click everything that moves. Complication is death for GUIs.
I am not the expert on this, but from conversations with people who were at the four-hour meeting, and previous conversations with people that have Eos/Linux on their machines at school, here's my summary of the NCSU deal, followed by my thoughts about a "university distribution."
Eos/Linux has been around for a little while now. Primarily, as I understand it, it has been RedHat with AFS support, Kerberos authentication, etc. ARLA is currently or will soon be used as the AFS (Andrew File System) handler. Also, as has been said before, the current Eos/Linux is a standard Red Hat install followed by packages for AFS support, etc. My impression is that there isn't a lot of NCSU-specific stuff, and that other than the wolf & bricks on the login screen, the Eos/Linux could theoretically be applied to other universities using AFS.
The big meeting is even more. My impression is that it was a meeting, maybe involving Red Hat, discussing the creation of a standard "workstation distribution", with most services turned off (web servers, etc.), of Linux supporting AFS, maybe based on the current Eos/Linux or maybe including other stuff. This distribution could be installed on university machines and would be supported by the computing center, since it would be standard. (Currently, Eos/Linux tends to be installed and maintained by an individual, with their admin's permission, but generally not support. And they don't want hordes of web servers out there.)
I think the idea of a university distro is a good one. If an installation didn't start up extraneous services (sound like BSD?), and provided support for AFS, and general Project Athena stuff, it seems to me that window dressing to put the university logo on it would be cake. Before X-Win32 and Tera Term were on the NT machines at State, they were only half-functional. As they are, they're really only functional for my stuff if there's a Sun machine to ssh to.
I have the impression that an all or mostly NT environment works fine, but getting NT to play well with others (AFS and Kerberos in particular) is not easy. The NT machines are cheaper and fast, but the applications I use, the way I use them, are on the Suns, and they don't go back and forth that well. If those NTs were Linux boxes, and the applications were compiled for them (most of the ones I use are), then what are now the less desirable machines to me would become sweet little speed demons in my office.
My concern with Eos/Linux was the hairiness of support, but a uniform distribution without bells and whistles might be just the thing.
Thank you for this (to most of us, anyway) unique opportunity.
I apologize in advance if I misstate the physics.
I was very impressed with your book, "The God Particle." I read it shortly after the cancellation of funding for the SSC (which derailed the summers of many of the folks out at Berkeley that I was taking classes from.) It seemed to me that your book, looking forward to the SSC construction, was hopeful that it would find the Higgs boson, that sneaky little generator of the Higgs field.
Recently, I heard an interview of yours on NPR, in which you described the problem of understanding quantum mechanics (or really, the problem of not understanding it.) And you sounded hopeful again that the Higgs field explanation would be verified soon.
Like Poincare's post on this thread, I wonder what, if anything, is going on with the SSC idea now, or if there are other projects that might demonstrate Higgs bosons in the near future. Also, what were your feelings about the cancellation of the SSC's funding? Do you feel it has delayed our progress in the field?
Lastly, I salute your hopefulness despite past adversity, and I wonder if you might share with us some of the sources of that hope for our understanding of physics in the future.
It's been a while since I read CFL. That said, here's what strikes me still:
The abbot who describes the line of abbots in terms of various metals: "I'm mercury...I spatter, but I come back together." For some reason, this coupled with his stomach distress seems especially evocative.
In addition to the excellent characterization and physical description, I am struck by the fact that CFL is so articulate a story on its own, that while we might say "it reminds me of medieval monks preserving texts after Rome fell" or "it describes an alternative post-apocalyptic future", it doesn't feel like it was _influenced_ by those, though of course it no doubt was. Miller put together a story that, if it wasn't so effortless, I would say "includes elements of" medieval history, various threads of sf, and some Christian mythology (I mean Wandering Jew stuff, I'm not saying Christianity as a whole is mythology here), and probably other things too. But it doesn't feel like these things were patched together, or even artfully weaved; talking about CFL, it feels like those similarities are observations of _mine_, not influences on Miller.
The story seems complete in its environment, independent. I have been told that if two flavors are balanced so carefully that to your tongue, they taste like a whole new flavor, that is called a "fantasia". (Coke has been described as a fantasia flavor. Can you pick out what flavors are in it?) I'm trying to say that CFL, or at least its environment, is a fantasia.
A previous comment mentioned that it was interesting that the monks copied (and illuminated) texts they didn't understand. A side comment: this is not particularly different from a good bit of the illumination and rewriting that went on in the Middle Ages and elsewhere. Of course, there were highly educated monks, but there were also poor fellas painstakingly copying down texts in language they were not fluent in, on subjects that were simply cryptic.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why no one's put a link for Cheapass Games, which I also heartily recommend. There's loads of creativity, and if you only liked one game out of five, it'd still be better value for money than buying a typically priced game. And believe me, you'll like more than one out of five.
The Cheapass game most like the sort of "civilization development" games you described is probably One False Step for Mankind.
Bob
The parent to this made the observation that whether people would like a Live CD depends on who they are.
In light of that, I would like to add my voice against the tide of the "don't do that, it's stupid" comments.
The question wasn't:
"Should I send a Live CD with my Christmas cards?"
"Are my friends going to appreciate a Live CD?"
"What are alternatives to sending a Live CD?"
Let's let trustedserf, who probably knows the people on his/her Christmas list better than we do, make the call of what to do for Christmas, and stick to offering some useful comment on the various distros out there.
I lurked through these posts because my mom's computer is in the shop because it collapsed under the weight of virii and spyware, so she'd appreciate a CD that let her surf and/or recover data when Windows is conked out. I didn't expect I'd be wading through a lot of comments from people pretending to know trustedserf's friends better than he/she does.
Ditto for the pop-up crash in 1.0PR, which made amusements like Project Rockstar unusable. I am _so_ glad it's gone in 1.0.
Of course, for me that was in Linux -- Firefox 1.0PR in Windows had a few differences from the Linux version (and didn't, as far as I could tell, have the popup crash).
That said, I haven't had any problems with Firefox 1.0 on either the Windows or Linux machines. But I might not qualify as a high-intensity user.
If I only had the time! Niggling things like work keep pulling me away...
On a more serious note, on the scale of addictions, gameaholism has got to be one of the least worrisome. Possible health effects? I can come up with eyestrain and RSI, which don't hold a candle to health risks from smoking or drinking. Social effects? Possible (and I know this is _very_ arguable) social isolation, as opposed to secondhand smoke, or all the potential trouble that public drunkenness can lead to.
Lastly, I'll go out on a limb and say that all subjects of addiction serve one or more purposes for the user. For example, alcohol is a significant element in our social fabric, in addition to having potentially appealing chemical effects. Even a game-hater has to admit that games can be a means of anonymous communication, mindless entertainment, stress relief, and external validation. Some of us would claim that games can have much more important benefits than that, encouraging creativity and critical thinking being obvious examples.
Maybe time would be better spent thinking about addictions in general, and what if anything society needs to do about them, instead of picking a bogeyman du jour to vilify?
I haven't used mine as much as I expected -- I don't know if they've got newer models, but mine has audible keyboard clicks, and I find I don't write LaTeX as fast by keyboard as I can write math, so plain paper is better for me for taking notes. Nonetheless, I've never had a serious problem with it, when I talked to their tech support (about a minor memory thing -- it acted like it had less than it did) they were outrageously helpful and actually solved the problem over the phone.
Light, convenient, don't have to worry about software incompatibilities (it "uploads" by pretending you're typing now, rather than when you did)...worth looking at.
I've been playing 3rd ed. D&D over a blog, and it's been working out awfully well.
We've got some downtime at the moment, since the DM's on vacation, but generally, it's been a very active blog. And the blog format allows people with real jobs to play, even if they're geographically separated. (I'm in a different country from the rest of the group.)
I thought that this would satisfy my long-suffering D&D jones, and it almost does -- but now I want to start my own campaign. Once a DM, always a control freak, I suppose. :)
Did you read the same article I did? I didn't see anywhere that Katz said that drone wars are less moral than other wars. Or that he didn't like smart weapons. He made an observation, and wondered what it bodes for the future.
But, since you bring it up, the issue is not: should we fight this war in a new high-tech way that causes less casualties, or an old and brutal way that causes more casualties and heartbreak. Instead, one concern about the development of "Drone Wars" might be: if war doesn't have consequences for us, why not fight?
There are opportunities for war that aren't taken, partly because the cost is too great. What would be the result if there was no cost? Would we just forget about all that expensive diplomacy and have nation-states with no more complicated relationships than football teams? If so, what would that world be like?
Personally, a more important concern is not "when everyone fights with machines, what'll happen" but rather "if _we_ fight with machines, how will the other guy respond?" I think that there will be have-nots for the foreseeable future, and how they respond to "the new war" matters more in the short run.
Terrorism is a result of desperation and powerlessness, with some rage and psychosis thrown in. I imagine that terrorists feel this way: There is a giant power is oppressing them, destroying them, and they must strike back. But they don't have the tanks or planes or the subs to take on that power. So they use the hammer they've got (bombs, hijackings), and they hit the place they can do the most damage (civilians.) Maybe then the giant power will think or care about what it's doing to them, and stop crushing them.
When we declared a war on terrorism, I suspect that Al Qaeda was thrilled. If they could have gone to war with us in a conventional way, instead of terrorism, they would have. Finally they were taken seriously enough to go toe-to-toe with America. I imagine some of them were hopeful that they would finally get to fight with Americans, and kill American soldiers.
But they didn't really have the chance. The Americans were like (nearly) unseen aliens, sending precise destruction down from the skies. They mostly didn't see an American to shoot at.
So, what message does that send? Even when the opportunity for conventional war comes up, it is unbalanced: they get killed and we don't. If you felt that our government was exterminating you or your way of life, what could you do about it? I'm concerned that the war against terrorism will convince many people that terrorism is the only way left to them to wage war against us.
That's one of the parts of this research that I heard about first. (Carl Wieman is my dad's cousin.) Not only were they able to get colder than anyone had been before, they were able to do it in a way that most research laboratories could replicate. Apparently cryogenic research has been "opened to the masses", so to speak. :)
Bob Wieman
A thought that this comment gave me was "why do people make web pages?" Personal ones, that is. I've seen amateur journalism, fan sites, etc., that took hours of learning and labor. And people put them out there for everyone to look at and, hopefully, benefit from.
Some elaboration:
People make web pages to express themselves. To spread information they think is important. To let others know who they are. To conveniently provide something to people they know (family photos, for example.) Because they want to learn how to use an exciting new technology.
I think all these reasons apply equally well to open source software. Of course, there are other reasons too, but I think perhaps the analogy might make "average people" think about it from a new perspective.
Bob
Incidentally, IBM's techexplorer is a plug-in to Navigator and IE to display LaTeX documents. You can find it here.
Barney
An interesting collection of essays, with references to D&D and moral panics, is "The Satanism Scare". (I forget the editors.) Despite the name, these are essays analyzing various elements of the interest in Satanism during the '80's (remember those Geraldo episodes?) I found them an interesting investigation of a brief media panic, that has left only vague and uncertain memories for most people, of the "wasn't there something about some kid who (insert disturbing behavior or tragedy here)" variety.
I agree with your sentiment. While the DMCA technically protects "effective" copy protection measures, and to me that means the measure has to actually prevent someone from being able to make readable copies, the DMCA specifically mentions encryption, which could include practically anything.
This was a problem I had with the DVD issue: in principle, I could make an exact copy of a DVD, and it would still play on any DVD player. A lock that every player has a key to isn't an "effective" lock.
Now, I might back down in the case of DVD's, because the DVD-R's you can buy are pre-burned so you can't copy the encryption key, and so the encryption combined with the control of the production of "crippled" recordable discs is an effective measure (although it's not solely electronic.)
In any case, it becomes a burden on the user that they have to demonstrate that the "encryption" isn't an effective means of copy prevention, which permits copyright holders to use stupid schemes to restrict fair use and overstrengthen their copyright privileges, depending on the high cost of litigation to keep users from fighting back.
Is translation into another language encryption? (The Navajo language was used as code in WWII, so it can be used to prevent copies from being understandable.) If I cook up a jury-rigged Babelfish (I think I'll call it "Barneyfish") to convert my book to Welsh, and sell the book, with Barneyfish, so you non-Welsh speakers can read it, can I sue you for DMCA violations if you use Babelfish, or some other automatic translator, instead of Barneyfish? After all, if you make a copy of the book, it's still all Welsh to you, unless you use Barneyfish or some "circumvention device."
(As a side note, what if you have your Aunt Gladys, who knows Welsh, read it to you? Is she circumventing the copy protection? Surely this is fair use. If the DMCA allows the big bad copyright holders to sue poor old Aunt Gladys, it must be a bad law.)
I don't think I know enough to give a complete answer. When you say your IP agreement says you have to sign over any inventions, does that mean that the company has any rights to any inventions you make while working for them? If so, it's not clear to me that they'd need your signature on anything that agrees that their patent application is valid. (They might not feel this way, of course.)
If your IP agreement says that you have to sign whatever document they hand to you regarding patents, etc., then you're pretty much stuck, although I wouldn't feel too bad claiming that at least one of my signatures can't really be legally binding in that case.
It seems to me that you could sign a document that says, essentially, "I contributed in the invention of X, and did so while under IP agreement with the company." I don't know about the intricacies of the law and patent applications, but in the abstract, your question implies that it seems to you that they're claiming more rights than they deserve, from an invention you contributed to.
You shouldn't (I use shouldn't in the "my sense of morals and logic" sense, since I don't know if the law agrees with me here) have to assert that the rights the company is claiming are appropriate; you probably do have to indicate that whatever rights they claim, they are claiming because you (and your coworkers) invented the thing while working at the company, so the company is justified in applying for a patent at all.
If, as your post indicates, you're not working for them any more, you might be able to talk to them and work something out: that is, you might be able to agree to something you're comfortable with, such as, "the actual device (or whatever) in this patent application (or a particular example of such a thing) is in fact the one designed in part by me while working at the company, and therefore is the company's to patent. I do not necessarily subscribe to any claims as to the breadth of application or scope of this device (or whatever) in the patent application."
The company may be troublesome, but if your IP agreement was like the few I've seen, it doesn't seem to me like you're claiming rights to IP that you ceded in your agreement, so I don't think they should be able to successfully sue you for breach of contract. All you're doing is saying that the patent application was written up by patent lawyers, not you, and that they are willing to claim more than you would if it was your patent to apply for, which it isn't.
This seems to me to satisfy everybody; your conscience is clear, because you haven't legally claimed something you don't believe. The patent office, probably, won't care what you think and will approve the patent anyway, and so the company will get what they want too.
Of course, this won't change anything as far as IP being abused by big companies to beat up on little guys, but the question wasn't "What can I do to fight the IP Man?", the answer to which is probably buried in every Patent article on Slashdot.
Barney
Some friends of mine and I have been talking about intelligent moderation schemes, in terms of individual interest. Slashdot's moderation works pretty well, as far as it goes. But out on the news servers, you've got a truckload of information in a tankerload of waste, and that's in the topics you're interested in.
Having a good personal assessment scheme without asking me to categorize (a little bot that watches me read, and guesses how much interest I have based on time spent reading, which titles start me reading, and a real simple subjective scale at the end, a "1 to 10, how'd you like this post?"). The little AI tries to make connections -- are my preferences author based? Topic/keyword? Length? Flame content? And develops an evolving rating scheme. If it was successful, pretty soon I'd trust that I could ignore everything rated 2 and below, and spend less time surfing and more time getting information.
Of course, the idea applies to weblogs, too. Generally speaking, any filter that got rid of stuff that I consider crap, without me having to figure out WHY it's crap, would be enormously handy.
I'm just a little feller. I don't post early and often, I'm not 1337, and I've only read half of the DMCA.
/. take IP seriously. Whether it's software patents or click-through licenses or copy protection or GPL, there's a lot of posts and a lot of argument about it. I know it's a topic that I think is interesting and important.
But I'm standing up with you. And Jon and Rob. I hope the book spreads some consciousness about the almost-timeless problem of adolescence, how rough it is for most people, and how most people cope with it okay without losing their sanity, and what can help them make it through instead of making it harder.
I think it is a good thing, and is the right thing, and I salute the people who went to the effort of doing it. From the kids brave enough to tell the world about their pain and humiliation, to the folks at Andover (who are NOT going to make a lot of money at this, I expect), to Jon and Rob, who also endure more pain and humiliation than they should have to.
Now here's my two cents on the intellectual property mess.
It seems that lots of people on
Now, I'm not as rabidly paranoid as some others, so I think that Jon and Rob are not cleverly scheming to use other people's work for their own devious purposes. I expect that most of the stories published are:
- not from the people whining about their rights to their posts
- from people who wanted to tell their story, and would be honored to have it more widely published
- quite possibly fair use.
But I don't know, and neither does almost anyone who's posted about it. Therefore, maybe we should wait until it comes out and see if anyone whose work is published feels like their rights have been infringed before we unleash all our righteous rage. There are things Jon has said that I've thought were inaccurate conclusions, but that hardly seems reason to presume that this book is going to have infringing material in it that the copyright owner's going to be upset about.
In the this-isn't-the-law-but-it's-what-I-think-is-right
category, I don't think anyone's going to make a lot of profit from this. So I don't really feel that anyone's liable to benefit overmuch from someone else's talent. And the only situation that I can imagine someone getting hurt from their post being published is if they sent to Slashdot expecting that no one they knew would read it, and when it is published as a book, someone does read it and is able to identify them, and they didn't want anyone they knew to read it. But this seems somewhat unlikely. No undue benefit, probably no undue harm -- in my little world, there's no foul.
And if in your little world, there's some horrible moral lapse or negligence that _might_ be going on, maybe hold judgement and a little trust that the good guys we know and love are doing a good job, until you see the end product?
Bob
I've wanted to ask a question regarding this for a while. Maybe this forum isn't being read much anymore, and no one will reply, but...
My reading of the DMCA, regarding copy protection, can be summarized by "If it requires a key, then it's locked. If you get past a lock without using the key, then you broke in." That is, as you quoted, if you normally need something with the authority of the copyright holder to get access, then that's a measure that controls access, and the DMCA makes evading such measures illegal, in general.
I think, this is not supposed to mean something like the language the work is in, or the means by which it is stored. Most digital media stores the information in 1's and 0's, and I have to apply something to decode it and make it readable (gain access), like a CD player, disk drive, etc. However, these aren't processes or treatments that have anything to do with the copyright owner.
Specifically mentioned as a technological measure controlling access to a work is encryption.
My question is: does DVD encoding really fit the general definition? In particular, the DVD decoding that takes place in the DVD player is licensed or something from the MPAA, but they don't hold the copyright to any particular DVD movie. Is their licensing of the decoding stuff "with the authority of the copyright holder?"
It seems to me that the idea is, if normally I need a key from the copyright holder, then that's a measure controlling access to the work. In this case, I don't really need a key from the copyright holder, I just need a DVD player. The copyright holder didn't give me anything separate from the work to gain access.
The counterargument, I think, would run like this. I don't know if this is true in fact, so please let me know. The MPAA gives decoding keys to DVD player manufacturers, with the authority of the copyright holder in some way. Effectively, the manufacturers get the key in advance for a multitude of copyrighted materials (the DVDs.) And, the DVD encoding isn't just how the media is stored, since I can change the encoding so that some manufacturers' keys work and some don't.
My counter-counterargument, which isn't legal and maybe childish, is that the "with the authority of the copyright holder" business ought to require more of the copyright holder themselves. I totally understand copy protection by, say, including a CD key or something, so that you need to use something else you got from the copyright holder (the key) to get to the work. DVD encoding is included in my player, and I don't have to apply anything other than the media itself to get access to it. If I were to make an exact duplicate of the DVD, I could give it to my friend (violating the copyright), and we could both play it. I wouldn't have to copy a key to be typed in, or run a decryption program that came with the DVD, or otherwise apply something from the copyright holder to gain access to the work.
Anyone with an opinion on any of these points of view, either from a personal feeling standpoint or a "this is how I think the law is meant to be interpreted" way, I'd be interested in hearing it.
I agree with much of what you say.
Bulletproof install: works if you know the configuration ahead of time. Barring that, the RH 6.1 install didn't hassle ME any. Win95 installs were usually fine, but I've had them go south on me. Not fun.
Getting rid of stuff:
No one seems to complain about the MS Dos prompt option, which is still on Win98 (I haven't seen 2k). Stripping stuff that you already have that is being adopted by others (separate user profiles in Netscape, Windows, etc.) is marketing suicide. Like you say, "power users" can know and use the cryptic command lines to get stuff quick. The GUI idea succeeded because normal users don't need the intricacy, but need the usual operations to be easy and impossible to forget. GNOME's explorer utility, and in fact all those GTK apps, are the beginning. I think it might surprise some of us how satisfied "granny" can be with a GNOME desktop with some handy icons in the taskbar.
The GUI must be slick:
Everyone is for this, but I don't actually think it's a big deal. The GUI is supposed to be easier than typing. Easier in terms of knowledge and simplicity. That's it. I guess that ease-of-use, but easiest to use is awfully close to Macs: one button, one purpose, click everything that moves.
Complication is death for GUIs.
I am not the expert on this, but from conversations with people who were at the four-hour meeting, and previous conversations with people that have Eos/Linux on their machines at school, here's my summary of the NCSU deal, followed by my thoughts about a "university distribution."
Eos/Linux has been around for a little while now. Primarily, as I understand it, it has been RedHat with AFS support, Kerberos authentication, etc. ARLA is currently or will soon be used as the AFS (Andrew File System) handler. Also, as has been said before, the current Eos/Linux is a standard Red Hat install followed by packages for AFS support, etc. My impression is that there isn't a lot of NCSU-specific stuff, and that other than the wolf & bricks on the login screen, the Eos/Linux could theoretically be applied to other universities using AFS.
The big meeting is even more. My impression is that it was a meeting, maybe involving Red Hat, discussing the creation of a standard "workstation distribution", with most services turned off (web servers, etc.), of Linux supporting AFS, maybe based on the current Eos/Linux or maybe including other stuff. This distribution could be installed on university machines and would be supported by the computing center, since it would be standard. (Currently, Eos/Linux tends to be installed and maintained by an individual, with their admin's permission, but generally not support. And they don't want hordes of web servers out there.)
I think the idea of a university distro is a good one. If an installation didn't start up extraneous services (sound like BSD?), and provided support for AFS, and general Project Athena stuff, it seems to me that window dressing to put the university logo on it would be cake.
Before X-Win32 and Tera Term were on the NT machines at State, they were only half-functional. As they are, they're really only functional for my stuff if there's a Sun machine to ssh to.
I have the impression that an all or mostly NT environment works fine, but getting NT to play well with others (AFS and Kerberos in particular) is not easy. The NT machines are cheaper and fast, but the applications I use, the way I use them, are on the Suns, and they don't go back and forth that well. If those NTs were Linux boxes, and the applications were compiled for them (most of the ones I use are), then what are now the less desirable machines to me would become sweet little speed demons in my office.
My concern with Eos/Linux was the hairiness of support, but a uniform distribution without bells and whistles might be just the thing.
But like I said, I'm not the expert.
Dr. Lederman,
Thank you for this (to most of us, anyway) unique opportunity.
I apologize in advance if I misstate the physics.
I was very impressed with your book, "The God Particle." I read it shortly after the cancellation of funding for the SSC (which derailed the summers of many of the folks out at Berkeley that I was taking classes from.) It seemed to me that your book, looking forward to the SSC construction, was hopeful that it would find the Higgs boson, that sneaky little generator of the Higgs field.
Recently, I heard an interview of yours on NPR, in which you described the problem of understanding quantum mechanics (or really, the problem of not understanding it.) And you sounded hopeful again that the Higgs field explanation would be verified soon.
Like Poincare's post on this thread, I wonder what, if anything, is going on with the SSC idea now, or if there are other projects that might demonstrate Higgs bosons in the near future. Also, what were your feelings about the cancellation of the SSC's funding? Do you feel it has delayed our progress in the field?
Lastly, I salute your hopefulness despite past adversity, and I wonder if you might share with us some of the sources of that hope for our understanding of physics in the future.
Again, thank you.
Bob Wieman
It's been a while since I read CFL. That said, here's what strikes me still:
The abbot who describes the line of abbots in terms of various metals: "I'm mercury...I spatter, but I come back together." For some reason, this coupled with his stomach distress seems especially evocative.
In addition to the excellent characterization and physical description, I am struck by the fact that CFL is so articulate a story on its own, that while we might say "it reminds me of medieval monks preserving texts after Rome fell" or "it describes an alternative post-apocalyptic future", it doesn't feel like it was _influenced_ by those, though of course it no doubt was. Miller put together a story that, if it wasn't so effortless, I would say "includes elements of" medieval history, various threads of sf, and some Christian mythology (I mean Wandering Jew stuff, I'm not saying Christianity as a whole is mythology here), and probably other things too. But it doesn't feel like these things were patched together, or even artfully weaved; talking about CFL, it feels like those similarities are observations of _mine_, not influences on Miller.
The story seems complete in its environment, independent. I have been told that if two flavors are balanced so carefully that to your tongue, they taste like a whole new flavor, that is called a "fantasia". (Coke has been described as a fantasia flavor. Can you pick out what flavors are in it?) I'm trying to say that CFL, or at least its environment, is a fantasia.
A previous comment mentioned that it was interesting that the monks copied (and illuminated) texts they didn't understand. A side comment: this is not particularly different from a good bit of the illumination and rewriting that went on in the Middle Ages and elsewhere. Of course, there were highly educated monks, but there were also poor fellas painstakingly copying down texts in language they were not fluent in, on subjects that were simply cryptic.
More than enough from me.