My opinion or yours does not matter. The marketplace determines what is good and what is crap.
The almighty marketplace says Internet Explorer is ~10x better than Firefox. Opera is obviously utter "crap." Windows is clearly the best OS ever made. And Quark is the best page layout app available.
Point is, there are lots of factors at work that may prevent the best product from dominating the market. Joel's products may not be top sellers due to poor advertising, or competitor lock-in, or overpricing---I don't know. But to write them off as crap just because you haven't heard of them seems premature.
Anyway, his small company in NY likely doesn't have the best programmers out there, so it's not a good case in point. I'd say Joel's argument is sound whether his company is or not.
Not quite. If you read more carefully, what they mean is they rely on most peers being honest. This seems like a reasonable assumption. Something vaguely like a meta-mod system decides which peer's votes are actually trustworthy.
What's really clever is that consistently dishonest peers aren't flat-out ignored---their votes are reversed. Only nodes that essentially vote randomly get ignored.
But why did people need to create.NET-specific versions of these tools? Ant and CruiseControl are pretty much agnostic of development platform. Sure, if you want to extend Ant you need to do it in Java... but c'mon, it's a build tool. Your build tools don't have to be made using the same language as the project you're building with them!
thats called malicious damage and will be met harshly with fines, lawsuits and possible jail time
Not if our buddy Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has his way. He has publicly suggested punishing downloaders with malicious programs that "destroy their computer."
PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show.
This is one of the the central things holding back Linux "domination." DOS won because it was cheaper and easier to figure out than the competition. Its lack of advanced features was a boon.
OTOH as others have noted, Linux is trying to be best at everything -- it's not simple. Efforts like Linspire certainly help, but they're not there yet. Linux will never kill Windows unless it beats it in usability.
It would be interesting to see what some people that really wanted to attack grammar checking could do with the source code to this program
The people who a really want to attack grammar checking and similar challenges are assuredly way ahead of whatever this professor has written. Computational linguistics is a serious field that goes far beyond your basic Word grammar checker. No one in that field claims to have software that can analyze the "argument flow" in essays, however. So it's a bit hard to believe that a sociology professor with no background in linguistics has outdone them all.
That said, it doesn't look like the prof was really pushing the program as some magic new language tool. The implication was that it did a bit more than look for keywords, but not much more---just enough to make it hard for students to game the system.
What we hear and see being run by a bunch of profiteering luddites is completely unappealing to me.
What scares me is that the **AA are not really acting like luddites. Any time a new advance in digital media comes along, they have three choices: (a) ignore it or run from it; (b) embrace it as a way of offering a better product; (c) embrace if as a means of controlling your customers more, thus offering a worse product. And they inevitably choose C.
Take the recent flap with WMA:
Microsoft: Hey, we made this cool licensing technology so people can safely distribute media more easily. It has a few sloppy security flaws, but...
Overpeer: Let's exploit a security hole & install adware on P2P users' computers!
RIAA: Yeah, why else would we want a licensing feature anyway?
Only a little exaggerated... Point is, the **AA are have no fear of technology that can be used to increase their power over the market.
Just because a company is behind the product, is it wrong?
No, they're talking about Kazaa's "business model." If a company is behind it, and markets the product as a way of downloading media, and bases all its advertising and revenue projections on the assumption of Napster-like volume, then their business model seems to be encouraging (and to rely upon) infringement.
But it's still not clear where that leaves an open source P2P app whose authors say they made it "so information can be free!" or some such. Does their "'business' model" encourage infringement? The scary part about a case this big is that no matter which way it goes, it'll set an ambiguous precedent.
Making spam or any other form of communication illegal is a violation of free speech.
Free speech is not an absolute right. Courts have long held certain forms of communication to be illegal while upholding the 1st Amendment's principles.
Example 1: Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre--it may cause harm via the ensuing stampede. (see Schenck v. US)
Example 2: Claiming your sugar pills cure cancer--"commercial speech" is afforded less protection.
Example 3: Showing porn to minors--the content is legal, but not the act of communicating it to a minor. (Redrup v. NY)
Example 4: Following someone 24/7 shouting slogans at them even when they tell you to go away--this is harrassment. (eg, Frisby v. Schultz)
In fact, restrictions on speech that are content-neutral are given relatively lax treatment (see US v. O'Brien).
I pay for the connection, that does not give me the right to file for damages every time I don't like something that i receive.
The legal strategy against spam mirrors example #4: spammers can be censored because they are engaging in harrassment. Now granted, it's difficult to define exactly what type of email is automatically considered harrassing. But recent laws are a good start--commercial in nature, no remove link and no valid return address. If someone creates the digital equivalent of a "no solicitors" sign, we might just get somewhere...
(IANALBITSLC - not a lawyer but I took some law classes once)
The version of Grammatik that shipped with WordPerfect during the Windows 3.1 era will hands-down beat MS's current grammar checker. It definitely did use parse trees by then---I know this because it had an option that actually showed you the tree for each sentence. I was a budding newspaper editor at the time and it was a great way to learn the finer points of the English language. It also had a far more useful help system that explained the various structures and tenses.
even a moderate improvement over what MS does now would likely require an order of magnitude more code and run-time computation, making it inappropriate for most usage!
You're kidding right? If I type a blazing 10 characters/sec, my system has ~300 million clock cycles to process each keystroke. Computational linguistics researchers have developed tons of programs that can do excellent grammar parsing in far less time than that.
But the proof is in the pudding... dig out an old Windows 3.1 copy of WordPerfect and compare its grammar checking against a current ver of Word. For years I kept that app in a dusty corner of my system for checking important documents like cover letters. It's 10-year-old technology and still does a better job than Word.
That summary on the main page is very misleading. Summary says:
92% of the 200 attendees surveyed would gladly trade enough information to steal their identities for a chance to win theater tickets
TFA says:
the latest survey of 200 people at London High Streets and The results typically are released a few weeks before Infosecurity Europe kicks off in London
In other words, it's not 92% of 200 *conference attendees*. It's of 200 random people who walked through the theatre district. I know we all love irony, but somehow I think security conference attendees aren't quite that gullible.
I'm assuming your housemate was working on the plastic polybot modules, which were run off of an offboard processing board
Yeah, he was working on the G1 modules, which were controlled by a cable leading to a PC. The PC processed a simple script language and sent commands to the modules. I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the UMich robots are a step behind here, using human "pilots."
About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.
Cool, I remember the videos for that stuff. I was referring to a separate team that did work on distributed (car) traffic monitoring (and some cool ideas for military use). It unfortunately didn't look like they were working with the robot lab at all.
I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work:) Ain't it? They had a great atmsophere there -- even in shaky financial times -- and an incredible variety of projects. It's a shame they've been cursed with such little commercial success.
See also
my recent post higher up on this thread. I got to see these things in action as an intern at PARC and they're pretty cool. They don't require manual remote control like the UMichigan versions seem to. And they can be reconfigured (sometimes autonomously) into other shapes as well.
And from the looks of the CMU site linked to above, their project is heavily based on this PARC work.
I interned at Xerox PARC two summers ago and saw
a snake-like robot very similar to this. The motion is different---undulating like a caterpillar instead of using treads. But otherwise strikingly similar.
theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality
This is how PARC's modular robots worked, which is the really cool part. The modules could be snapped apart and then reassembled into a different-shaped robot. Some models could even
reconfigure themselves without intervention.
The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage...
Some of the PARC modules did exactly that. And they had limited demos with specialized attachments instead of generic modules, also as you mentioned.
My housemate that summer was working on the control system of these robots. The computer fed them simple script-like commands, so there was no real AI backing it up. Given that, it was impressive what these things managed to do. But of course, they were working toward taking input from each module and applying complex processing to react to it.
As far as your suggestion about distributed processing across modules, other groups at PARC were doing work in that field too. Awesome place to intern!
I agree about that GP's misunderstanding of the "news reporting" part of the law. That being said, I think your other points contain some misunderstanding of the Fair Use Doctrine:
They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.
Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.
A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.
What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.
The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories).... That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.
You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.
There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site.
Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.
Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.
I'd be quite surprised if the result was a ruling against Google. Google News is not very much different legally from many other sites and blogs that aggregate news (including Slashdot). However, I'd also be mildly surprised if the result was a ruling in Google's favor. I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.
Answer: because cell phone radiation doesn't cause cancer at any rate appreciable from statistical noise, IF AT ALL.
Isn't this story about a study that proves cell phone radiation damages DNA in the brain? If that's not a direct precursor to cancer I don't know what is...
As for some of those other points:
(1) living near a cell phone tower is very different from holding a phone against your head due to the
inverse square law
(2) microwave ovens are built to contain their radiation
(3) I was under the impression that in general,
cancer rates are on the rise
I hear ya about hysterical people though... my dad is on our town's zoning board and had to sit through a lot of pseudo-scientific blabbering by angry residents when a cell tower went up nearby.
Fair use allows for this sort of thing. It is not written, "Thou shalt not make money."
In fact, making a profit does decrease your chances of winning a fair use defense. Making money is the first of four guidelines that the Copyright Act (of 1976) lists for evaluating whether something is fair use vs. a copyright violation.
I agree that Google is doing other news sites a service, drawing viewers to them to read the body of the article (ditto for Google Images, etc). It's a strong argument, but one Google would probably rather not have to make. No one here really knows why News is still in beta, but the risk of defending a costly lawsuit---even with a good chance of victory---is probably a factor. Google has some pretty expensive lawyers, and I'll trust their judgement on this one.
Funny, but MS has been one of the worst offenders in the "second-guess Windows widgets and reinvent the wheel" category. Each version of Office starting with 97 implemented a custom menubar that did not adhere to the standard win UI. To this day (ie, Office 2003), the toolbar uses old-school Windows 98 tooltips. And Visual Studio.NET not only ignores the WinXP widget look, it also compiles apps that did that same! (at least, as of a year ago)
Forgiving the irony, this is still bad because many smaller developers look to MS as the authority on good UI design. How many sites have you seen with tutorials or libraries that try to closely imitate the Office-style menus? There are dozens of such menu implementations, all similar looking but each with its own quirks and none based on the "shared" Windows standard.
In fact, the FCC's main job, aside from spectrum allocation and interference reduction, is to make rules about the implementation of radiocommunications devices.
It only does the latter in order to accomplish the former pair of goals. All the examples you cite---regulating power, frequency deviation, etc.---deal with reducing interference.
The story is similar for regulating content (eg, on radio and broadcast TV). The purported goal is to allocate the finite spectrum to broadcasters who provide the most benefit to society. To simplify this judgement they require that everyone who gets a slice adhere to certain standards of quality, fairness, social conservatism (ugh), etc.
This only works if running a deficit forces politicians to reform their ways and spend less. On the contrary, Bush's tax cuts did nothing to stem the tide. The war in Iraq and the pricey prescription drug bill both came after the tax cuts---as will social security privatization, if he ever succeeds in foisting that one on people.
Don't kid yourself: Bush is not "starving the beast," he's trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Claiming P2P networks should be banned because it's used to share copyrighted works is like claiming that HTTP should be banned because web pages are used to slander people, or that knives should be outlawed because knives are used for stabbings.
These are proably the same politicians who go around saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people." But video games, nooo those are the root of all that is evil in modern society. Gimme a break.
This is a US only problem, it's not affecting the rest of us.
With all the Slashdot posts about software patents under consideration in the EU I don't know how you can say this. The problem has spread already, and it will only get worse.
When was the last time you heard of the latest gadget coming from the US?
As far as the latest gadget is concerned I'd say the iPod is pretty darn recent. You also cite the Segway, which is not exactly ancient technology.
now recently video on demand (real, with pause controls etc). Over on your side of the pond you are still debating broadcast-flags and the like!
This type of VoD sees widespread availability in the US--even in upstate New York when I was in college.
BitTorrent and RSS is so much more elegant
I can't speak for RSS, but BitTorrent was invented by a guy living in Washington state. The US is certainly not lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to either of these technologies. And few of us pawns (erm, citizens) are pushing for the broadcast flag.
You can't just go around starting wars everytime the moneys tight anymore.
Last I checked the war(s) are putting our economy deeper into debt, so I'm not sure this rationale stands up well. I also haven't heard of any serious boycotts of US goods, as you imply. Still, I'm no fan of our foreign policy lately, so I agree with the gist of your ranting here.
What the US government doesn't realise is that corporations can only be depended on to do one thing; whatever is in their own best interests.
I think the US government--or rather, the politicians who drive it--realize this quite well, since it's exactly how they act also. The two are awfully interdependant... just look at all of Bush's business connections. But I'd personally be happy if the "rats" in both business and politics jumped ship. The US would be better off for sure.
But of course that won't happen. What is happening is that these people are spreading their ideas throughout the world. The UK, if you think it's a haven of any sort now, will not stay insulated from these problems for long.
Slashdot Mirror
The almighty marketplace says Internet Explorer is ~10x better than Firefox. Opera is obviously utter "crap." Windows is clearly the best OS ever made. And Quark is the best page layout app available.
Point is, there are lots of factors at work that may prevent the best product from dominating the market. Joel's products may not be top sellers due to poor advertising, or competitor lock-in, or overpricing---I don't know. But to write them off as crap just because you haven't heard of them seems premature.
Anyway, his small company in NY likely doesn't have the best programmers out there, so it's not a good case in point. I'd say Joel's argument is sound whether his company is or not.
What's really clever is that consistently dishonest peers aren't flat-out ignored---their votes are reversed. Only nodes that essentially vote randomly get ignored.
But why did people need to create .NET-specific versions of these tools? Ant and CruiseControl are pretty much agnostic of development platform. Sure, if you want to extend Ant you need to do it in Java... but c'mon, it's a build tool. Your build tools don't have to be made using the same language as the project you're building with them!
Not if our buddy Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has his way. He has publicly suggested punishing downloaders with malicious programs that "destroy their computer."
This is one of the the central things holding back Linux "domination." DOS won because it was cheaper and easier to figure out than the competition. Its lack of advanced features was a boon.
OTOH as others have noted, Linux is trying to be best at everything -- it's not simple. Efforts like Linspire certainly help, but they're not there yet. Linux will never kill Windows unless it beats it in usability.
Can we mod the story itself -1 Flamebait?
The people who a really want to attack grammar checking and similar challenges are assuredly way ahead of whatever this professor has written. Computational linguistics is a serious field that goes far beyond your basic Word grammar checker. No one in that field claims to have software that can analyze the "argument flow" in essays, however. So it's a bit hard to believe that a sociology professor with no background in linguistics has outdone them all.
That said, it doesn't look like the prof was really pushing the program as some magic new language tool. The implication was that it did a bit more than look for keywords, but not much more---just enough to make it hard for students to game the system.
What scares me is that the **AA are not really acting like luddites. Any time a new advance in digital media comes along, they have three choices: (a) ignore it or run from it; (b) embrace it as a way of offering a better product; (c) embrace if as a means of controlling your customers more, thus offering a worse product. And they inevitably choose C.
Take the recent flap with WMA:
Microsoft: Hey, we made this cool licensing technology so people can safely distribute media more easily. It has a few sloppy security flaws, but...
Overpeer: Let's exploit a security hole & install adware on P2P users' computers!
RIAA: Yeah, why else would we want a licensing feature anyway?
Only a little exaggerated... Point is, the **AA are have no fear of technology that can be used to increase their power over the market.
No, they're talking about Kazaa's "business model." If a company is behind it, and markets the product as a way of downloading media, and bases all its advertising and revenue projections on the assumption of Napster-like volume, then their business model seems to be encouraging (and to rely upon) infringement.
But it's still not clear where that leaves an open source P2P app whose authors say they made it "so information can be free!" or some such. Does their "'business' model" encourage infringement? The scary part about a case this big is that no matter which way it goes, it'll set an ambiguous precedent.
Free speech is not an absolute right. Courts have long held certain forms of communication to be illegal while upholding the 1st Amendment's principles.
Example 1: Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre--it may cause harm via the ensuing stampede. (see Schenck v. US)
Example 2: Claiming your sugar pills cure cancer--"commercial speech" is afforded less protection.
Example 3: Showing porn to minors--the content is legal, but not the act of communicating it to a minor. (Redrup v. NY)
Example 4: Following someone 24/7 shouting slogans at them even when they tell you to go away--this is harrassment. (eg, Frisby v. Schultz)
In fact, restrictions on speech that are content-neutral are given relatively lax treatment (see US v. O'Brien).
I pay for the connection, that does not give me the right to file for damages every time I don't like something that i receive.
The legal strategy against spam mirrors example #4: spammers can be censored because they are engaging in harrassment. Now granted, it's difficult to define exactly what type of email is automatically considered harrassing. But recent laws are a good start--commercial in nature, no remove link and no valid return address. If someone creates the digital equivalent of a "no solicitors" sign, we might just get somewhere...
(IANALBITSLC - not a lawyer but I took some law classes once)
The version of Grammatik that shipped with WordPerfect during the Windows 3.1 era will hands-down beat MS's current grammar checker. It definitely did use parse trees by then---I know this because it had an option that actually showed you the tree for each sentence. I was a budding newspaper editor at the time and it was a great way to learn the finer points of the English language. It also had a far more useful help system that explained the various structures and tenses.
You're kidding right? If I type a blazing 10 characters/sec, my system has ~300 million clock cycles to process each keystroke. Computational linguistics researchers have developed tons of programs that can do excellent grammar parsing in far less time than that.
But the proof is in the pudding... dig out an old Windows 3.1 copy of WordPerfect and compare its grammar checking against a current ver of Word. For years I kept that app in a dusty corner of my system for checking important documents like cover letters. It's 10-year-old technology and still does a better job than Word.
92% of the 200 attendees surveyed would gladly trade enough information to steal their identities for a chance to win theater tickets
TFA says:
the latest survey of 200 people at London High Streets
and
The results typically are released a few weeks before Infosecurity Europe kicks off in London
In other words, it's not 92% of 200 *conference attendees*. It's of 200 random people who walked through the theatre district. I know we all love irony, but somehow I think security conference attendees aren't quite that gullible.
Yeah, he was working on the G1 modules, which were controlled by a cable leading to a PC. The PC processed a simple script language and sent commands to the modules. I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the UMich robots are a step behind here, using human "pilots."
About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.
Cool, I remember the videos for that stuff. I was referring to a separate team that did work on distributed (car) traffic monitoring (and some cool ideas for military use). It unfortunately didn't look like they were working with the robot lab at all.
I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work :)
Ain't it? They had a great atmsophere there -- even in shaky financial times -- and an incredible variety of projects. It's a shame they've been cursed with such little commercial success.
And from the looks of the CMU site linked to above, their project is heavily based on this PARC work.
theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality
This is how PARC's modular robots worked, which is the really cool part. The modules could be snapped apart and then reassembled into a different-shaped robot. Some models could even reconfigure themselves without intervention.
The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage ...
Some of the PARC modules did exactly that. And they had limited demos with specialized attachments instead of generic modules, also as you mentioned.
My housemate that summer was working on the control system of these robots. The computer fed them simple script-like commands, so there was no real AI backing it up. Given that, it was impressive what these things managed to do. But of course, they were working toward taking input from each module and applying complex processing to react to it.
As far as your suggestion about distributed processing across modules, other groups at PARC were doing work in that field too. Awesome place to intern!
They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.
Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.
A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.
What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.
The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories). ... That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.
You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.
There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site.
Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.
Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.
I'd be quite surprised if the result was a ruling against Google. Google News is not very much different legally from many other sites and blogs that aggregate news (including Slashdot). However, I'd also be mildly surprised if the result was a ruling in Google's favor. I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.
Isn't this story about a study that proves cell phone radiation damages DNA in the brain? If that's not a direct precursor to cancer I don't know what is...
As for some of those other points:
(1) living near a cell phone tower is very different from holding a phone against your head due to the inverse square law
(2) microwave ovens are built to contain their radiation
(3) I was under the impression that in general, cancer rates are on the rise
I hear ya about hysterical people though... my dad is on our town's zoning board and had to sit through a lot of pseudo-scientific blabbering by angry residents when a cell tower went up nearby.
Fair use allows for this sort of thing. It is not written, "Thou shalt not make money."
In fact, making a profit does decrease your chances of winning a fair use defense. Making money is the first of four guidelines that the Copyright Act (of 1976) lists for evaluating whether something is fair use vs. a copyright violation.
I agree that Google is doing other news sites a service, drawing viewers to them to read the body of the article (ditto for Google Images, etc). It's a strong argument, but one Google would probably rather not have to make. No one here really knows why News is still in beta, but the risk of defending a costly lawsuit---even with a good chance of victory---is probably a factor. Google has some pretty expensive lawyers, and I'll trust their judgement on this one.
Funny, but MS has been one of the worst offenders in the "second-guess Windows widgets and reinvent the wheel" category. Each version of Office starting with 97 implemented a custom menubar that did not adhere to the standard win UI. To this day (ie, Office 2003), the toolbar uses old-school Windows 98 tooltips. And Visual Studio .NET not only ignores the WinXP widget look, it also compiles apps that did that same! (at least, as of a year ago)
Forgiving the irony, this is still bad because many smaller developers look to MS as the authority on good UI design. How many sites have you seen with tutorials or libraries that try to closely imitate the Office-style menus? There are dozens of such menu implementations, all similar looking but each with its own quirks and none based on the "shared" Windows standard.
Argh. </rant>
It only does the latter in order to accomplish the former pair of goals. All the examples you cite---regulating power, frequency deviation, etc.---deal with reducing interference.
The story is similar for regulating content (eg, on radio and broadcast TV). The purported goal is to allocate the finite spectrum to broadcasters who provide the most benefit to society. To simplify this judgement they require that everyone who gets a slice adhere to certain standards of quality, fairness, social conservatism (ugh), etc.
Don't kid yourself: Bush is not "starving the beast," he's trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Claiming P2P networks should be banned because it's used to share copyrighted works is like claiming that HTTP should be banned because web pages are used to slander people, or that knives should be outlawed because knives are used for stabbings.
...Or that video games should be a legal liability because they might make people think violence is ok?
These are proably the same politicians who go around saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people." But video games, nooo those are the root of all that is evil in modern society. Gimme a break.
Sigh... where does one begin...
This is a US only problem, it's not affecting the rest of us.
With all the Slashdot posts about software patents under consideration in the EU I don't know how you can say this. The problem has spread already, and it will only get worse.
When was the last time you heard of the latest gadget coming from the US?
As far as the latest gadget is concerned I'd say the iPod is pretty darn recent. You also cite the Segway, which is not exactly ancient technology.
now recently video on demand (real, with pause controls etc). Over on your side of the pond you are still debating broadcast-flags and the like!
This type of VoD sees widespread availability in the US--even in upstate New York when I was in college.
BitTorrent and RSS is so much more elegant
I can't speak for RSS, but BitTorrent was invented by a guy living in Washington state. The US is certainly not lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to either of these technologies. And few of us pawns (erm, citizens) are pushing for the broadcast flag.
You can't just go around starting wars everytime the moneys tight anymore.
Last I checked the war(s) are putting our economy deeper into debt, so I'm not sure this rationale stands up well. I also haven't heard of any serious boycotts of US goods, as you imply. Still, I'm no fan of our foreign policy lately, so I agree with the gist of your ranting here.
What the US government doesn't realise is that corporations can only be depended on to do one thing; whatever is in their own best interests.
I think the US government--or rather, the politicians who drive it--realize this quite well, since it's exactly how they act also. The two are awfully interdependant... just look at all of Bush's business connections. But I'd personally be happy if the "rats" in both business and politics jumped ship. The US would be better off for sure.
But of course that won't happen. What is happening is that these people are spreading their ideas throughout the world. The UK, if you think it's a haven of any sort now, will not stay insulated from these problems for long.