The 5-15 is just what Sun would in theory make from the licensing from Kingston products. That isn't the goal -- the goal is to increase the demand for Sun's memory. My guess would be it's worth about 4 times whatever the royalties would be.
Is pro-football sexist, because it discriminates against people who aren't 6'6" 250lbs or bigger, and these people are disproportionally women?
If it discriminates against the poor, that's one thing. BUT DON'T CALL THAT RACIST.
Does anyone stop to think that saying, "it discriminates against the poor" means "it discriminates against black people" makes the racist assumption that black people are poor?
Never mind. I already know the answer. A jounalist? Stop to think?
The thesis of Transparent Society seems to me to be that to some degree, there is a tradeoff between privacy and freedom. That is, when people can operate in secret, it is easy to e.g. plant stories about your political opponents. Brin does exempt "private lives", saying that there is no purpose to be served by monitoring people when they are not "in public". If you think this sounds like 1984, remember that the government will be watched even more carefully. I didn't read his book very carefully, so it is possible I have misstated aspects of his position. But the book isn't really an argument so much as a pointing out of questions that need to be answered.
I don't fully agree with Brin, because as a libertarian, I can't see how you can say "you don't have a right to secrets" (not that Brin actually says this). My position is that:
1. anyone in government, in their capacity as a government official, should be monitored to the fullest extent feasible. That means running recorders going into voice recognition software and posting it all to the internet for all activities as a part of the government. Since this isn't totally technically feasible, I'd settle for all internal memos, and corrospondence with outside agencies. Because someone working for the government freely accepted that job, and because we, the people, are delegating our power to the government (this is Hobbes account of the origin of government power), we are free to hold our employees accountable in any way we please.
Secrecy, as in military secrets, I haven't considered.
2. Corporations should be subject to this, but at a lesser level. Incorporation is a special exemption from certain laws. The government sells special legal status for favors. One of these favors is corporate income tax. We can add another, that all memos must be preserved, all business plans and contracts, etc. must be kept for like 20 years. Depending on the type of information, it can be required to be released after a certain time period.
Realistically, we may have gotten to the point where there is a need for different degrees of incorporation. (Which protects against lawsuits, is the main thing, but also gives an existence to the company longer than any of the people.)
3. Private citizens, non-incorporated businesses, and anyone not covered, should be totally exempt. Of course, if they work for a corporation, they will know that stuff they write to their boss will become public record in X years, and if they work for the government, it will be public record tomorrow. To answer your specific question -- no I have no right to know what's in George W.'s bookmarks, or Al Gore's, if we're talking about his home computer.
We would probably need an agency more or less separate from the government (not controlled by any existing agencies or branches) to monitor the government. Should be directly elected by the people.
Just wanted to take this moment to recommend David Brin's The Transparent Society, a well supported argument about why accountability is even more important than anonymity. Think about it -- this is a case where a government agency was investigated, and still they missed a lot of stuff. If they were a little better at it, they wouldn't have been investigated at all.
What can we do? Public, highly intrusive, monitoring of all aspects of government. If we (the people, you know) are delegating power, we need to watch how that power is used.
Labels which imply a value judgement must be completely avoided: the definition of "obscene" depends entirely on who you are. Definitions of Mild, Explicit etc. need to be commonly understood from an openly published and clearly precise set of guidelines.
My point is that even fairly reasonable people may honestly believe they are applying objective criteria, when in fact, different people will see things differently. To use the racism example, a recent article in the Daily Cal quoted a black high school student saying something derogatory about the "white kids" at her school. It was mild, but a reader wrote in to comment on the fact that this was accepted but if the races had been reversed, it would have been labeled as racist.
I'm not saying that the lines are vague. I'm saying that there are many categories where one person will be 100% sure something should be labeled one way, and another person, also fairly rational, will be 100% sure it should be labeled otherwise. And these are frequently the criteria that would be most relevant to blocking. Everyone will have similar opinions about whether a page is about cars or computers. People will not have similar ideas about whether a page is "explicit", whether a given JPEG is art or pornography, or whether a page promotes drugs. Is Naked Lunch literature or pornography? How about Anne Rice's Exit to Eden with content as explicit as what you would find on the newsgroups, but also literary value as commentary on the impossibility of finding real gratification in debauchery (but much more so the former than the latter)?
This is why we need many moderators, and the ability to define your own effective moderation as a function of all the moderations.
I think that the above examples of using the hostname to encode search strings, or parameters to a function, should be good enough for prior art, this really is a good idea. It's not (only) about customer tracking as in shopping carts. From the web page:
...bietet eine absolut neue Möglichkeit des Customer-Trackings, die unkompliziert auf einem Webserver zu installieren ist und für den Benutzer kein Sicherheitsrisiko darstellt, wie z.B. ein Cookie. Jedem Besucher einer Website wird bei der Anfrage der Webseite ein eigener (virtueller) Webserver zugeteilt: www.ID-Nummer.Domain.de und gleichzeitig ein Hostname vergeben.
"...offers an absolutely new possibility in customer tracking, that is simple to install on the webserver, and poses no security risk to the user, like, e.g. a cookie. Every visitor will be assigned their own personal hostname upon visiting the page."
I don't see this as a being for the purpose of knowing who you are dealing with when you are actually serving the pages (allthough no doubt it could be used for that), but rather that you can make this change to your webserver, and then you have a very simple method of looking at what individual users did from your log files. For example, how many pages does the average user visit? It would require a lot of overhead in cookies and stuff while the user is doing the reading to be able to tell that. Add sevenval's software, and you just have to change the places where the user enters, then you can more easily analyse your log files.
I didn't read the whole page because my german sucks, so maybe this is just a side point, but it seems like it would be a cool ability to have.
Here at UC Berkeley, I have been called "racist" because I am opposed to Affirmative Action. This system won't work because the standards are no defined. Even if they seem very clear to you, or to me, they also seem very clear to the people whose opinions differ widely from yours.
The only solution to this sort of system is based on automatic matching of your opinions to those of individual moderators. For example, you moderate 10 pages a day. Over time, the system can determine how you would moderate a page based on the similarity of your moderation to other moderators, and can block pages based on criteria you specify.
So, for example, I would agree with those moderators who moderate child porn as "obscene", but would not agree with those moderators who moderate Anais Nin as "obscene", so my browser could tell me "You will probably find this page obscene. Continue?" before displaying it. Or, I could configure it to block such sites if my kids (maybe such a system will actually be functioning before I have kids) are using the computer.
If I'm a puritanical christian, maybe I agree with other puritanical christians, and my software will block damn near everything. The key is that it's using the same system.
The same system could also be used to rank results in search engines, for example, and I could ask the computer for recommendations on some new fiction based on what other people with my taste recommend. Assuming suitable go-betweens to preserve privacy could be established, it could be the world's first successful computer dating service.
If the patent examiner only has 8-12 hours to research a patent, why do patents cost so much? Or, to put it another way, if patents run about $10,000 with lawyers fees, why doesn't the patent office just jack up their fee to hire enough examiners to look at a patent thoroughly? If they did it well, it would probably be able to reduce the legal fees associated with it, because the patent examiner would be able to assist the company in delineating exactly what they can claim, and clear up ambiguous language, rather than having ultra-expensive lawyers do this.
--Kevin
Re: stuffed full of all the features anyone could
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the Win2K/Linux situation, in that you have a large and complex system stuffed full of all the features anyone could dream up, stacked up against a small system implementing proven algorithms and techniques
Which is the system full of all the features anyone could dream up and which is the small system?
Windows 2000 actually has some pretty nice features. If the user interface were replaced with something sane (by which I mean, doesn't assume I'm an idiot and do something other than what I say), it could be a decent system. I think it's sort of wishful thinking to call Linux small. Sure, the kernel may be only 50 megs of source, but the system as a whole (take any disto you want) is far too big to be understood by anyone but an expert with time to burn. Not that Win2k is better, but it isn't clearly inferior to Linux in this particular case.
To "own" something is not to possess something. When I say, "I own this", I do not mean that I have physical possession of it. What I mean is that I have certain rights pertaining to it. Because a bunch of these rights are often bundled together, we have a shorthand term for them, "to own".
I own a Bic ballpoint pen. Several, in fact. What I mean when I say, "I own a bic ballpoint pen" is that there's this thing, which I'm calling "a bic ballpoint pen", and I have certain rights with respect to this thing. Like, I have the right to have it in my physical possession, if I so choose. I have the right to destroy it if I so choose. I have the right to take it apart, or to give it to someone else. I have the right to write with it, or clean my fingernails with the pocket clip.
This is the collection of rights I get when I purchase a ball point pen. I do not bother to enquire about what exact set of rights I am buying when I go to the store and buy a pen. Long experience has taught me that the rights will be exactly what I expect them to be. Now Bic comes along and said, we have changed the bundle of rights which we sell with our pens. You are now required to return them to us when they are empty. I, of course, tell Bic to get lost, because based on common practice, and based on their failure to indicate that the sale did not include everything you normally expect, they sold me *all* the rights normally associated with purchase.
The analogy for music is that there is a long history (however old the cassette is) of duplicating music purchased in one format in order to use it in another. Now, when I go in to Rasputin's, and buy some music, I'm implicitely agreeing to a contract, which says, "I'll give you the price indicated on this, in return for the standard rights that come with buying music." That is, when I "own" an album, I have all those rights normally associated with the album. This is to differentiate with other cases, like a DJ who may have been given demos on the condition that he can't sell them.
Now, when the RIAA comes along and says, "now you can't copy it", they are trying to take away rights after the sale. I already bought the music. I bought the right to listen to it, the right to destroy the media, and by standard practice, the right to make copies for personal use. If the artists don't want to sell the right to make copies for personal use, this has to be indicated BEFORE the sale is made.
That's my position. A lawyer would say it's rambling gibberish, so don't try to use it in court. But, that's what I think the law should say.
In the type of wacko libertarian economic theory books I tend to read, there is frequently discussion of the "free rider problem". I will explain the free rider problem in brief, then I think it will be really obvious how this applies to UCITA.
Assume you have a bunch of people living in a flood plain. Joe's Dam Company comes by and says, hey, everyone, if we built a dam across the river, it wouldn't cost that much, and you would be able to stop worrying about getting flooded. Let's assume he's right. Let's further assume that it's worth $250 to each resident to not have to worry about getting flooded, and it would cost $100 per resident to build the dam.
The dam will never get built.
You see, from each residents point of view, the dam will get built if enough people agree to contribute to building it. But everyone, not just the people who pay for the dam, will benefit from it. So, if some resident just says, I'm not paying, he isn't statistically going to make a difference in whether the damn gets built. The dam will either get built, or not get built. If he contributes, he's out $100 dollars. This is the problem of free riders.
How does this apply to UCITA? The dam represents reasonable laws as opposed to the UCITA. The free rider is the state that wants to attract software publishers by passing UCITA. If a state were to adopt the UCITA, it might attract software vendors, all other things equal. So all the states have an incentive to be the first on their block to adopt UCITA. The whole gain (from a state's perspective) of the UCITA is in their control. The damage caused by UCITA, that is, it being adopted nation-wide, is only partially under their control. They must assume that UCITA will eventually become law, and therefore, they must pass it first, to attract the software vendors.
Of course, this assumes that if, for example, Virginia has passed UCITA, and I, in California, buy software from a Virginia company, then I am bound by Virginia law. Well, the license agreement will no doubt say that it is governed by the laws of the state of Virginia, and the laws of the state of Virginia say that it applies. But I'm in California, where a shrink wrap agreement has no force, so the clause that says it's covered by Virginia law isn't relevant. So if it's valid, then it's valid; but if it's not valid, then it's not valid.
IANAL, of course, and the rulings of courts generally have no connection to reality, or logic. I'm seriously considering moving as soon as I have a little money saved up (and am out of school) to some other country where the politicians can actually be influenced by logic and the laws are written by economists, not by corporate lawyers.
Incorrect, in this case. The beauty of the market system is that the control of the money tends toward those who are most capable of managing it. If you had to answer the question, "who is better at predicting the market than anyone else?", what would you answer? You'd probably end up with something like mutual fund managers, or day traders, or something like that. See, people who are bad at predicting the market bet wrong, and increase fluctuations (e.g. they buy when something is high, driving it yet higher). But these people don't make money. They soon lose the money they have, and people won't give them more. People who are good at predicting the market bet correctly, and decrease fluctuations (buy when low, make less low; sell when high, make less high).
So, the market process will tend toward the situation where:
Investment capital is controlled by people who are good at managing investment capital.
This doesn't mean that people who aren't that good at managing money won't have money, only that they will leave it to the experts. And the experts know enough to higher the people who know enough to make the computers give good answers.
Of course, I may have a slightly distorted view of things, since my dream job would be using adaptive artificial intelligence techniques like genetic algorithms to do economic modelling. Not (only) for the money, but because it's an intesting problem.
BTW, I would guess that economic modelling is about half way between the complexity of modelling the entire solar system, and that of modelling the earths weather. The first can be done to a reasonable accuracy with hand calculation. The latter is probably on the order of 10 times more calculations & measurements to be able to extend the forecast one more day. Economic modelling could be done well enough to make a lot of money on current supercomputers, if you knew a good algorithm (which no one does yet). I mean, people can estimate, but it's a lot like giving someone a table listing the locations of all the object in the solar system, not telling them what anything was (like not even saying that the numbers represent positions), and then asking for the next set of numbers. Once you know the laws behind it, it's easy to do, even though the system is actually chaotic.
That's a surprizing quote. Everything I've heard of Galbraith makes him sound like a major cheerleader for the state. What is this from? Maybe I should finally get around to reading some of his stuff.
I wouldn't have a problem with Microsoft Active X components installing automatically no matter what the browser preferences. Unlike every other company in question, I am already running Microsoft software, probably at least 150 megs of it, if I have IE with ActiveX. Does anyone know how to modify IE so that it identifies itself as the Mac version?
Local communities do not have the authority to "give up access" to some useful information to block access to obscene information. You do not have a right to information. You have a right to freedom of the press. That is, you have a right to publish. If someone installs a filter that blocks your page, they are infringing your right to publish. The constitution does not say freedom of speech and freedom of the press unless this might offend some people somewhere. In fact, last time I read it, I didn't seem to see any exceptions anywhere.
It would probably be pretty easy to make a case for defamation of character if your site is incorrectly blocked. Imagine if someone ran around saying "John Doe's new book is pornography", when in fact it's an argument against prayer in schools.
Just to make sure no one misses it -- Harry Browne, libertarian, has the least errors reported by validator.w3.org. (Which is pretty surprizing -- it's hard to make a site that ugly validate).
I don't really care whether it's open source. I really want a compiler for windows. I'm not about to pay $1000 for visual studio, though. So I'm really happy about this. Socialists can go whine elsewhere. You want a compiler, write it. Borland is offering something. If you don't like it, fine. If it benefits some people, fine. If it conflicts with your political views, too bad. You ever hear "don't look a gift horse in the mouth"?
For the truely paranoid, though, Corel now has a way to make a proprietary Linux distribution. They still have to open the source to their mods, but it doesn't do you much good if it will only compile with Borland's proprietary compiler.
This is something I never understood about vegans. I can understand saying "I don't eat meat because it's disgusting/it's cruel to animals". I don't understand the "please, can you go check if this may have been cooked in pan that had ever been used to cook meat?" paranoia. Could someone explain to me why vegans have a religious aversion to animals products? That is, why do they feel compelled to check so thoroughly that something doesn't have meat in it?
Also, what's with the refined sugar thing? Is it true that vegans don't eat it because they think it involves animal products?
Ascorbic Acid I think is Vitamin C. Beta Carotene I think is one of the B vitamins. Ferric-III-Orthophosphate is Iron and Phosphorus. Niacinamide is Niacin, good for you. Manganese, Thiamin and Chromium are necessary in small amounts. Folic acid is an anti-oxidant. Sodium Molybdate and Sodium Selenite contain Molybdinum and Selenium, which are needed in really really small doses (like several micrograms a day).
Some of them you could do without for a long time without any bad effects. Some of them you'd start to feel pretty shitty in a week without. Some of them will cause your skin to turn orange or cause liver failure in high enough doses.
Yeah, but most junk food is fat and carbo rich. High protein is a good idea, because when you balance it with your latte and blueberry muffin breakfast, your almost eating healthy.
The one way around this that I can think of, is that gov. requiring M$ to use something such as CVS (no M$ crap where they might alter and hide code), and a required check for compilation check (that is, compile the code from CVS, and do a checksum to see they are indeed the same thing).
When you go asking the government to be your mommy, remember why you moved out in the first place. Are you sure you want the methods used to manage software projects dictated by the government? Do you think that once they got their foot in the door, they would actually stop at microsoft? Think 10 years down the line. Oh, you want to port linux to the new PDA architecture? Just fill out these forms, and we can schedule the hearing in about 18 months. The public comment period will have to be at least 3 months, and then, if everything goes well, you should be able to get started in under 2 years.
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For those banging their heads against the monitor. He multiplies by zero at one point. Then, all bets are off.
The 5-15 is just what Sun would in theory make from the licensing from Kingston products. That isn't the goal -- the goal is to increase the demand for Sun's memory. My guess would be it's worth about 4 times whatever the royalties would be.
Is pro-football sexist, because it discriminates against people who aren't 6'6" 250lbs or bigger, and these people are disproportionally women?
If it discriminates against the poor, that's one thing. BUT DON'T CALL THAT RACIST.
Does anyone stop to think that saying, "it discriminates against the poor" means "it discriminates against black people" makes the racist assumption that black people are poor?
Never mind. I already know the answer. A jounalist? Stop to think?
--Kevin
The thesis of Transparent Society seems to me to be that to some degree, there is a tradeoff between privacy and freedom. That is, when people can operate in secret, it is easy to e.g. plant stories about your political opponents. Brin does exempt "private lives", saying that there is no purpose to be served by monitoring people when they are not "in public". If you think this sounds like 1984, remember that the government will be watched even more carefully. I didn't read his book very carefully, so it is possible I have misstated aspects of his position. But the book isn't really an argument so much as a pointing out of questions that need to be answered.
I don't fully agree with Brin, because as a libertarian, I can't see how you can say "you don't have a right to secrets" (not that Brin actually says this). My position is that:
1. anyone in government, in their capacity as a government official, should be monitored to the fullest extent feasible. That means running recorders going into voice recognition software and posting it all to the internet for all activities as a part of the government. Since this isn't totally technically feasible, I'd settle for all internal memos, and corrospondence with outside agencies. Because someone working for the government freely accepted that job, and because we, the people, are delegating our power to the government (this is Hobbes account of the origin of government power), we are free to hold our employees accountable in any way we please.
Secrecy, as in military secrets, I haven't considered.
2. Corporations should be subject to this, but at a lesser level. Incorporation is a special exemption from certain laws. The government sells special legal status for favors. One of these favors is corporate income tax. We can add another, that all memos must be preserved, all business plans and contracts, etc. must be kept for like 20 years. Depending on the type of information, it can be required to be released after a certain time period.
Realistically, we may have gotten to the point where there is a need for different degrees of incorporation. (Which protects against lawsuits, is the main thing, but also gives an existence to the company longer than any of the people.)
3. Private citizens, non-incorporated businesses, and anyone not covered, should be totally exempt. Of course, if they work for a corporation, they will know that stuff they write to their boss will become public record in X years, and if they work for the government, it will be public record tomorrow. To answer your specific question -- no I have no right to know what's in George W.'s bookmarks, or Al Gore's, if we're talking about his home computer.
We would probably need an agency more or less separate from the government (not controlled by any existing agencies or branches) to monitor the government. Should be directly elected by the people.
--Kevin
Just wanted to take this moment to recommend David Brin's The Transparent Society, a well supported argument about why accountability is even more important than anonymity. Think about it -- this is a case where a government agency was investigated, and still they missed a lot of stuff. If they were a little better at it, they wouldn't have been investigated at all.
What can we do? Public, highly intrusive, monitoring of all aspects of government. If we (the people, you know) are delegating power, we need to watch how that power is used.
--Kevin
Beg to differ. Evolution would always choose perfection over the ability to improve.
--Kevin
Labels which imply a value judgement must be completely avoided: the definition of "obscene" depends entirely on who you are. Definitions of Mild, Explicit etc. need to be commonly understood from an openly published and clearly precise set of guidelines.
My point is that even fairly reasonable people may honestly believe they are applying objective criteria, when in fact, different people will see things differently. To use the racism example, a recent article in the Daily Cal quoted a black high school student saying something derogatory about the "white kids" at her school. It was mild, but a reader wrote in to comment on the fact that this was accepted but if the races had been reversed, it would have been labeled as racist.
I'm not saying that the lines are vague. I'm saying that there are many categories where one person will be 100% sure something should be labeled one way, and another person, also fairly rational, will be 100% sure it should be labeled otherwise. And these are frequently the criteria that would be most relevant to blocking. Everyone will have similar opinions about whether a page is about cars or computers. People will not have similar ideas about whether a page is "explicit", whether a given JPEG is art or pornography, or whether a page promotes drugs. Is Naked Lunch literature or pornography? How about Anne Rice's Exit to Eden with content as explicit as what you would find on the newsgroups, but also literary value as commentary on the impossibility of finding real gratification in debauchery (but much more so the former than the latter)?
This is why we need many moderators, and the ability to define your own effective moderation as a function of all the moderations.
--Kevin
I think that the above examples of using the hostname to encode search strings, or parameters to a function, should be good enough for prior art, this really is a good idea. It's not (only) about customer tracking as in shopping carts. From the web page:
...bietet eine absolut neue Möglichkeit des Customer-Trackings, die unkompliziert auf einem Webserver zu installieren ist und für den Benutzer kein Sicherheitsrisiko darstellt, wie z.B. ein Cookie. Jedem Besucher einer Website wird bei der Anfrage der Webseite ein eigener (virtueller) Webserver zugeteilt: www.ID-Nummer.Domain.de und gleichzeitig ein Hostname vergeben.
"...offers an absolutely new possibility in customer tracking, that is simple to install on the webserver, and poses no security risk to the user, like, e.g. a cookie. Every visitor will be assigned their own personal hostname upon visiting the page."
I don't see this as a being for the purpose of knowing who you are dealing with when you are actually serving the pages (allthough no doubt it could be used for that), but rather that you can make this change to your webserver, and then you have a very simple method of looking at what individual users did from your log files. For example, how many pages does the average user visit? It would require a lot of overhead in cookies and stuff while the user is doing the reading to be able to tell that. Add sevenval's software, and you just have to change the places where the user enters, then you can more easily analyse your log files.
I didn't read the whole page because my german sucks, so maybe this is just a side point, but it seems like it would be a cool ability to have.
--Kevin
Here at UC Berkeley, I have been called "racist" because I am opposed to Affirmative Action. This system won't work because the standards are no defined. Even if they seem very clear to you, or to me, they also seem very clear to the people whose opinions differ widely from yours.
The only solution to this sort of system is based on automatic matching of your opinions to those of individual moderators. For example, you moderate 10 pages a day. Over time, the system can determine how you would moderate a page based on the similarity of your moderation to other moderators, and can block pages based on criteria you specify.
So, for example, I would agree with those moderators who moderate child porn as "obscene", but would not agree with those moderators who moderate Anais Nin as "obscene", so my browser could tell me "You will probably find this page obscene. Continue?" before displaying it. Or, I could configure it to block such sites if my kids (maybe such a system will actually be functioning before I have kids) are using the computer.
If I'm a puritanical christian, maybe I agree with other puritanical christians, and my software will block damn near everything. The key is that it's using the same system.
The same system could also be used to rank results in search engines, for example, and I could ask the computer for recommendations on some new fiction based on what other people with my taste recommend. Assuming suitable go-betweens to preserve privacy could be established, it could be the world's first successful computer dating service.
--Kevin
If the patent examiner only has 8-12 hours to research a patent, why do patents cost so much? Or, to put it another way, if patents run about $10,000 with lawyers fees, why doesn't the patent office just jack up their fee to hire enough examiners to look at a patent thoroughly? If they did it well, it would probably be able to reduce the legal fees associated with it, because the patent examiner would be able to assist the company in delineating exactly what they can claim, and clear up ambiguous language, rather than having ultra-expensive lawyers do this.
--Kevin
the Win2K/Linux situation, in that you have a large and complex system stuffed full of all the features anyone could dream up, stacked up against a small system implementing proven algorithms and techniques
Which is the system full of all the features anyone could dream up and which is the small system?
Windows 2000 actually has some pretty nice features. If the user interface were replaced with something sane (by which I mean, doesn't assume I'm an idiot and do something other than what I say), it could be a decent system. I think it's sort of wishful thinking to call Linux small. Sure, the kernel may be only 50 megs of source, but the system as a whole (take any disto you want) is far too big to be understood by anyone but an expert with time to burn. Not that Win2k is better, but it isn't clearly inferior to Linux in this particular case.
To "own" something is not to possess something. When I say, "I own this", I do not mean that I have physical possession of it. What I mean is that I have certain rights pertaining to it. Because a bunch of these rights are often bundled together, we have a shorthand term for them, "to own".
I own a Bic ballpoint pen. Several, in fact. What I mean when I say, "I own a bic ballpoint pen" is that there's this thing, which I'm calling "a bic ballpoint pen", and I have certain rights with respect to this thing. Like, I have the right to have it in my physical possession, if I so choose. I have the right to destroy it if I so choose. I have the right to take it apart, or to give it to someone else. I have the right to write with it, or clean my fingernails with the pocket clip.
This is the collection of rights I get when I purchase a ball point pen. I do not bother to enquire about what exact set of rights I am buying when I go to the store and buy a pen. Long experience has taught me that the rights will be exactly what I expect them to be. Now Bic comes along and said, we have changed the bundle of rights which we sell with our pens. You are now required to return them to us when they are empty. I, of course, tell Bic to get lost, because based on common practice, and based on their failure to indicate that the sale did not include everything you normally expect, they sold me *all* the rights normally associated with purchase.
The analogy for music is that there is a long history (however old the cassette is) of duplicating music purchased in one format in order to use it in another. Now, when I go in to Rasputin's, and buy some music, I'm implicitely agreeing to a contract, which says, "I'll give you the price indicated on this, in return for the standard rights that come with buying music." That is, when I "own" an album, I have all those rights normally associated with the album. This is to differentiate with other cases, like a DJ who may have been given demos on the condition that he can't sell them.
Now, when the RIAA comes along and says, "now you can't copy it", they are trying to take away rights after the sale. I already bought the music. I bought the right to listen to it, the right to destroy the media, and by standard practice, the right to make copies for personal use. If the artists don't want to sell the right to make copies for personal use, this has to be indicated BEFORE the sale is made.
That's my position. A lawyer would say it's rambling gibberish, so don't try to use it in court. But, that's what I think the law should say.
--Kevin
In the type of wacko libertarian economic theory books I tend to read, there is frequently discussion of the "free rider problem". I will explain the free rider problem in brief, then I think it will be really obvious how this applies to UCITA.
Assume you have a bunch of people living in a flood plain. Joe's Dam Company comes by and says, hey, everyone, if we built a dam across the river, it wouldn't cost that much, and you would be able to stop worrying about getting flooded. Let's assume he's right. Let's further assume that it's worth $250 to each resident to not have to worry about getting flooded, and it would cost $100 per resident to build the dam.
The dam will never get built.
You see, from each residents point of view, the dam will get built if enough people agree to contribute to building it. But everyone, not just the people who pay for the dam, will benefit from it. So, if some resident just says, I'm not paying, he isn't statistically going to make a difference in whether the damn gets built. The dam will either get built, or not get built. If he contributes, he's out $100 dollars. This is the problem of free riders.
How does this apply to UCITA? The dam represents reasonable laws as opposed to the UCITA. The free rider is the state that wants to attract software publishers by passing UCITA. If a state were to adopt the UCITA, it might attract software vendors, all other things equal. So all the states have an incentive to be the first on their block to adopt UCITA. The whole gain (from a state's perspective) of the UCITA is in their control. The damage caused by UCITA, that is, it being adopted nation-wide, is only partially under their control. They must assume that UCITA will eventually become law, and therefore, they must pass it first, to attract the software vendors.
Of course, this assumes that if, for example, Virginia has passed UCITA, and I, in California, buy software from a Virginia company, then I am bound by Virginia law. Well, the license agreement will no doubt say that it is governed by the laws of the state of Virginia, and the laws of the state of Virginia say that it applies. But I'm in California, where a shrink wrap agreement has no force, so the clause that says it's covered by Virginia law isn't relevant. So if it's valid, then it's valid; but if it's not valid, then it's not valid.
IANAL, of course, and the rulings of courts generally have no connection to reality, or logic. I'm seriously considering moving as soon as I have a little money saved up (and am out of school) to some other country where the politicians can actually be influenced by logic and the laws are written by economists, not by corporate lawyers.
--Kevin
When can we expect a "block any post containing the word 'beowulf'" option? It's needed far more desperately than the Y2K command bunker was.
there will always be stupid people running them
Incorrect, in this case. The beauty of the market system is that the control of the money tends toward those who are most capable of managing it. If you had to answer the question, "who is better at predicting the market than anyone else?", what would you answer? You'd probably end up with something like mutual fund managers, or day traders, or something like that. See, people who are bad at predicting the market bet wrong, and increase fluctuations (e.g. they buy when something is high, driving it yet higher). But these people don't make money. They soon lose the money they have, and people won't give them more. People who are good at predicting the market bet correctly, and decrease fluctuations (buy when low, make less low; sell when high, make less high).
So, the market process will tend toward the situation where:
Investment capital is controlled by people who are good at managing investment capital.
This doesn't mean that people who aren't that good at managing money won't have money, only that they will leave it to the experts. And the experts know enough to higher the people who know enough to make the computers give good answers.
Of course, I may have a slightly distorted view of things, since my dream job would be using adaptive artificial intelligence techniques like genetic algorithms to do economic modelling. Not (only) for the money, but because it's an intesting problem.
BTW, I would guess that economic modelling is about half way between the complexity of modelling the entire solar system, and that of modelling the earths weather. The first can be done to a reasonable accuracy with hand calculation. The latter is probably on the order of 10 times more calculations & measurements to be able to extend the forecast one more day. Economic modelling could be done well enough to make a lot of money on current supercomputers, if you knew a good algorithm (which no one does yet). I mean, people can estimate, but it's a lot like giving someone a table listing the locations of all the object in the solar system, not telling them what anything was (like not even saying that the numbers represent positions), and then asking for the next set of numbers. Once you know the laws behind it, it's easy to do, even though the system is actually chaotic.
--Kevin
That's a surprizing quote. Everything I've heard of Galbraith makes him sound like a major cheerleader for the state. What is this from? Maybe I should finally get around to reading some of his stuff.
I wouldn't have a problem with Microsoft Active X components installing automatically no matter what the browser preferences. Unlike every other company in question, I am already running Microsoft software, probably at least 150 megs of it, if I have IE with ActiveX. Does anyone know how to modify IE so that it identifies itself as the Mac version?
Local communities do not have the authority to "give up access" to some useful information to block access to obscene information. You do not have a right to information. You have a right to freedom of the press. That is, you have a right to publish. If someone installs a filter that blocks your page, they are infringing your right to publish. The constitution does not say freedom of speech and freedom of the press unless this might offend some people somewhere. In fact, last time I read it, I didn't seem to see any exceptions anywhere.
It would probably be pretty easy to make a case for defamation of character if your site is incorrectly blocked. Imagine if someone ran around saying "John Doe's new book is pornography", when in fact it's an argument against prayer in schools.
--Kevin
Just to make sure no one misses it -- Harry Browne, libertarian, has the least errors reported by validator.w3.org. (Which is pretty surprizing -- it's hard to make a site that ugly validate).
So how about they make it a free download, and you can go buy the source. Would you actually buy the source? Pretty unlikely.
This is insightful? This is moronic.
I don't really care whether it's open source. I really want a compiler for windows. I'm not about to pay $1000 for visual studio, though. So I'm really happy about this. Socialists can go whine elsewhere. You want a compiler, write it. Borland is offering something. If you don't like it, fine. If it benefits some people, fine. If it conflicts with your political views, too bad. You ever hear "don't look a gift horse in the mouth"?
For the truely paranoid, though, Corel now has a way to make a proprietary Linux distribution. They still have to open the source to their mods, but it doesn't do you much good if it will only compile with Borland's proprietary compiler.
This is something I never understood about vegans. I can understand saying "I don't eat meat because it's disgusting/it's cruel to animals". I don't understand the "please, can you go check if this may have been cooked in pan that had ever been used to cook meat?" paranoia. Could someone explain to me why vegans have a religious aversion to animals products? That is, why do they feel compelled to check so thoroughly that something doesn't have meat in it?
Also, what's with the refined sugar thing? Is it true that vegans don't eat it because they think it involves animal products?
Any vegans out there who can enlighten?
--Kevin
Ascorbic Acid I think is Vitamin C. Beta Carotene I think is one of the B vitamins. Ferric-III-Orthophosphate is Iron and Phosphorus. Niacinamide is Niacin, good for you. Manganese, Thiamin and Chromium are necessary in small amounts. Folic acid is an anti-oxidant. Sodium Molybdate and Sodium Selenite contain Molybdinum and Selenium, which are needed in really really small doses (like several micrograms a day).
Some of them you could do without for a long time without any bad effects. Some of them you'd start to feel pretty shitty in a week without. Some of them will cause your skin to turn orange or cause liver failure in high enough doses.
Yeah, but most junk food is fat and carbo rich. High protein is a good idea, because when you balance it with your latte and blueberry muffin breakfast, your almost eating healthy.
I'm going to find a 7-11 that carries these ASAP.
--Kevin
The one way around this that I can think of, is that gov. requiring M$ to use something such as CVS (no M$ crap where they might alter and hide code), and a required check for compilation check (that is, compile the code from CVS, and do a checksum to see they are indeed the same thing).
When you go asking the government to be your mommy, remember why you moved out in the first place. Are you sure you want the methods used to manage software projects dictated by the government? Do you think that once they got their foot in the door, they would actually stop at microsoft? Think 10 years down the line. Oh, you want to port linux to the new PDA architecture? Just fill out these forms, and we can schedule the hearing in about 18 months. The public comment period will have to be at least 3 months, and then, if everything goes well, you should be able to get started in under 2 years.
--Kevin