Indeed, and with the case at hand in the Gulf, thanks to those dispersants, quite of bit of the oil is now a sort of emulsified goo. It has a specific gravity just about equal to that of the ambient seawater (so it hangs in suspension) and even if it could somehow be made to surface, it won't burn. AFAIK, there are no credible plans to get rid of that stuff. I'd imagine that it prolly clogs up fish gills quite well, too.
While the distinction between marketing and distribution is a good conceptual heuristic, in practice the two overlap, esp in p2p environments. "Distribution" on p2p systems raises the attention level (or mind-share) of others on the system. That mind-share piece is precisely the sort of thing that marketers are seeking. We have to acknowledge that attention is a very valuable commodity in the information economy, yet many analysts are blind to the fact that it's the only commodity in really short supply. Simply posting torrents does indeed increase mind-share, and it's that angle that the R*AA is also loath to admit.
If it's only about trademark, the legal standard is (and I paraphrase), "the possibility of confusion in the mind of the average person." By that standard, I think Hasbro's gonna lose, as "Scrabble" and "Scrabulous" don't seem interchangeable to me at all. Remember that PTO allowed Western Publishing to take the walking fingers of Yellow Pages, put a small line through it, and considered that sufficiently different to avoid infringement--despite the fact that most consumers didn't notice the difference. Western built an entire business off of that confusion. Scrabulous isn't even close.
Many universities routinely delete server logs a couple times or more a week, in large part b/c they indeed see no use to waste the space and staff time involved in storing them. The **AAs of course don't like this for the reasons noted in this discussion, but sadly, the gov't "terrorist" hunters don't either. There's been a move in the EU to require ISPs to archive logs for up to 2, maybe three years, so that they can (supposedly mine them and preemptively identify the bad guys. Of course, it's a fool's errand what with the obvious risks of false positives. Fortunately in the US the "save America from the terrorists"-branded politicians (Shrub, Rudy, etc) are simply too IT illiterate to go this direction (and hopefully, they won't read this post).
This is where things start to get very scary, ie, when Unis and other ISPs start being forced to spend their own resources to support the wacky agendas of other parties, be they media monopolies or ministries of fear. I know quite a few university sysadmins, and to them it's an ethical issue: it's a moral duty to protect the privacy of users, especially from prying third parties. Let's hope they push back.
Deficit government financing currently follows a simple model. Much of the current deficit comes from the massive tax cuts given to the wealthy when Bush came to power--we were in the black on current accounts when he took office. Now, instead of paying the taxes they would have paid under the previous arrangement, the wealthy beneficiaries of those tax cuts can take the same money and buy T-Bills and get both their money and a boatload of interest back. Great deal for them, lousy for the rest of us (and later generations)who end up financing the deal with our taxes.
My favorite part of the article was where it noted that the companies are considering trying to snag a cut of the artists' touring and gee-gaw revenue! I remember that in the 1970s, bands toured in order to help sell their albums, where their "real" money came from. With record companies offering even top artists ever-shabbier deals, touring is now the main source of income for bands--even with TicketMaster slurping up a huge cut. Isn't there some adage about geese and golden eggs, esp as the record companies are only intermediaries, and greedy ones at that?
Face it, the record companies are obsolete. They face a fundamental information problem--how to figure out what listeners want--but their info-feedback loop is desperately obsolete: produce it, market it, and hope it sells. Or, in the case of the Times Mag article, hire some guru who has a better clue. They've yet to discover this thing called the Internet[s], except insofar as people use it to "steal" "their" content. If we've learned enything with the Net, it's that info-iteration loops can be completed very rapidly and cheaply--we don't need to spend $millions to discover a flop. (As I'll soon see when my comments here are rated, and--weep, weep--trashed).
They are also obsolete because they do nothing that can't be done by other parties more cheaply and fairly. Do we really need these dinosaurs sucking out 60% of the revenue from a revenue stream that could be passing more simply between listeners and musicians? Not to be immodest, but I laid this all out in an article in the current issue of FirstMonday. We need not despise the record companies to realize that they should go the way of buggy-whip makers and store-front airplane ticket vendors--and, let's hope, residential real-estate agents.
Why not just post it anywhere on the Web, allow time for the Internet Archive (archive.org) to scrape it, then use their record as the timestamp? Seems to me that you could prolly also arrange something through creativecommons.
You are 100% correct. What usually causes a bubble is the BS pedaled by those puffed-up MBA "stock analysts." Think of housing: analysts kept hyping financially-thin high-risk lenders b/c the returns were SO fat, even if it couldn't last.
An even more disturbing example is how we got investors to build the Internet fiber backbone for us... Think on this. Companies like Level 3, PSINet, GlbalCrossing, etc were darlings of Wall St analysts b/c they were (in the 90s) the "next big thing." Assuming (correctly) that the Net was THE FUTURE, Wall St boneheads seemed to assume that anyone building infrastructure for it would make off with billions.
What those dummies neglected to notice is that the fiber backbone had such huge capacity that it was way easy, almost inevitable, to "overbuild" in the sense that with virtually unlimited carrying capacity, the backbone owners/installers couldn't charge enough to cover their vast capital expenditures. (Remember, this was at the moment when Enron thought that they could develop a futures market in broadband---which turned out to be much like a futures market in seawater). The fiber-pullers in fact had no credible long-term business model beyond Wall St loving them. Once it became clear that there was no credible fat revenue stream for them, they went under, and the successor firms who bought those assets got them at a price that realistically reflected the revenue potential of the fiber. Long story short, as a nation the US got its fiber backbone on the cheap, thanks to gullible investors listening to the hype of the financial analysts. Thanks!
So yeah, Web 2.0 might be a *financial* bubble, but like the tech boom of the 1990s, there's some very solid stuff there, and once the smoke clears and the greedy have either gotten cooked or rich, we'll just keep innovating, albeit for different employers if we're in the private sector. Wouldn't it be nice if our economy weren't held hostage by the analysts and their greedy clients? Maybe we could then live in economic security amidst innovation.
Exactly. Think about GPS-equipped cars, given that most driving is done on known routes--known to the point of absolute boredom. Do we need a map to get to work or the supermarket? Now, are you willing to pay an extra grand for that feature in your car, given that you might use it 2-3 times a year? I don't think so. Reminds me of how J&R's ads in the NY Times try to sell GPS as a way to save fuel. Puhleeze! Very good in rental cars, tho, where we can assume the driver is unfamiliar with the surroundings.
There's something deeper here, and it's about familiarity, and that's something that doesn't translate well into IT, as it's all about informal, non-structured knowledge--which defies easy mapping. Before we embark on trying to get fine-grained on defining location, from an interface perspective, we need to figure out a way to background what we already know so we don't have to navigate through an ocean of extraneous BS. (This is akin to me always looking for the "do it again, like last time" key combination, instead of having to work through several layers of commands/menus).
The point is, the capacity of our IT systems to inundate us with more info is apparently limitless, and piling on more info--locational, recommended/referred, etc--is self-defeating unless we can navigate it.
My personal IT Rule #1: what we need is not more info, but better filters. This is not about info overload, really, but about the need to develop solid algorithms to background intelligently what we don't want and to do decent second-guessing at what we do want. The MIT Media Lab understood this a decade or more ago, but got sidetracked on emotive robots and laptops that would magically rescue African children from their poverty. Clippy, for all her annoying intrusiveness and dull-wittedness, should have been a start, "understanding" users and their contexts, and "learning" about them. Compare her to the much-better contextual help in OpenOffice, and we might get at a starting point.
In short, remember the 1970s agenda of appropriate technologies. It's all about context, not gizmos.
Indeed. For a number of years all of the states and provinces with Great Lakes shorelines have had a multistate[/province] compact/contract that is supposed to have some oversight on this sort of thing. I assure you that the govs of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota--and of course, our fabulous governor here in Michigan--will lean hard on Daniels, et al for this.
Indeed, even here in Michigan, where we have the worst unemployment in the US (thanks to our economy being run by the most boneheaded auto execs imaginable), this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen. In part, that's b/c we've been here before; as myriad auto plants and suppliers have shut down over the past couple of decades we've been saddled with remediation costs for the brownfields they left behind. Believe me, the Bushies aren't about to support federal funding to clean up those messes. Just try building the "high-tech, knowledge-driven economy of the future" on poisoned ground.
Wrong. Corporations are essentially "legal persons" pursuant the 1886 Santa Clara Railroad case decided by the Supreme Court. Most European countries actually passed legislation at about the same time, creating this new legal entity. The rationale was that with this odd legal construction, liability for the new entity would be limited to the company's assets and not reach into the pockets of the owners--otherwise known as, "incorporation means never having to say you're sorry." Until Santa Clara, the only other businesses were sole proprietorships and partnerships, neither of which provided limited liability, and governmental charters creating limited liability entities with pretty narrowly-construed missions and time frames. Example: a group of entrepreneurs would want, about 1830, to build a bridge across the Ohio River; they'd go to Harrisburg (PA's capital) and get the legislature to charter and entity such as "Pittsburgh Iron Bridge Company." It'd have limited liability, but would dissolve once the bridge was built and it couldn't engage in other business without further approvals.
The most perverse side of Santa Clara is that it used the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment as justification. Recall that the core purpose of the 14th was to extend the Bill of Rights to the states so that the former slave states couldn't pass legislation disenfranchising the freedmen. Following the deal cut after the 1876 elections (a tie that went to the House, where the southern Dems let the Repub candidate for pres take the job on the condition that Reconstruction--military occupation of the South, strong protections of freedmen, etc--end), one of the slimiest moves of the US Gov't (comparable to Bush v. Gore), freedmen's rights were largely ignored.
In short, SCOTUS used an amendment authored to protect ex-slaves in order to give special rights to businessmen. Capitalism and human rights certainly have little connection to each other, at least in this case.
You're correct for the most part, of course. Most university rules prohibit users from willy-nilly hanging WiFi routers off of available open ether connections, but I've never heard of any enforcement against it, save where the routers interfere with existing infrastructure. In my own faculty office I sometimes plug in an AirPort Express, unauthenticated, to allow students to have access when we meet there, as the ambient official WiFi signal is too flaky to be useful in that location. I also occasionally do that in seminar and classrooms for the same reason. I've sometimes forgotten to unplug the router, thereby leaving wide-open, non-traceable access to the Net. Can the U get angry about that? Sure, but it's a minor violation of rules, not a piracy-facilitation issue. Were **AA to try and litigate that, the implication would be that all WiFi routers would have to be centrally registered and WAP-enabled by law, and that ain't gonna happen. 802.11g connections are usually fast enough for credible p2p, and I assume 802.11n will be even better in such a scenario.
For that matter, any student can walk into a nearby coffee shop and connect to a free, open WiFi connection and d/l to their heart's content. Even if the MAC addresses are logged, so what? There's no dB with those numbers that's universal or widely available.
Kjella is 100% correct. There are provisions in the otherwise despicable DMCA (US-only, of course) that explicitly penalize "fishing"-based IP claims. It'd be great to see EFF to sue RIAA on that one.
There's actually an interesting historical example of Dvorak success. At the outset of WW2, the US Navy decided for efficiency reasons to use Dvorak across their units. This was easy, as there was minimal relearning, given that the male desk jockeys on those keyboards were mostly new to typing anyway (remember that until the 1980s, "typing" was defined as women's work, and when men started typing on computers in large numbers the task was renamed to "keyboarding" in order to avoid threatening masculinity).
So the Navy trained thousands of men to use Dvorak and ordered up a mess of Dvorak-configured typewriters. It all worked famously, but at the end of the war, demobilization meant that those guys largely went to masculine jobs and quit typing, which went back and regendered to a feminine task, and women were, of course, almost all QWERTY. The Dvorak typewriters were junked and the experience largly disappeared from memory. In the end, it was one massive experiment that indeed showed the better efficiency of Dvorak--and the fact that it was all about social and workforce issues, and really very little about keyboard configs.
I'm amazed at the selectiveness with which libertarians apply their anti-state ideology. They will not be credible until they oppose things like probate courts, registers of deeds, intellectual property laws, USCITA, and, of course, the biggest of "big govenment" monsters, the Dept of "Defense".
They are about as consistent as their "federalist" friends, who support "states rights" until states allow abortions, legalize medical marijuana or the right to die, or, most outstandingly, try to run their own vote counting if there's a danger of Democrats winning (see Bush v. Gore, 2000, in which the "federalists" on SCOTUS explicitly said in essence, "yeah, we're ignoring federalism in this case, so don't consider this a precedent").
Libertarians, federalists, call them what you will; they are merely trying to place an intellectual gloss over efforts to reinforce the power of the haves over the rest of us. Consistency? Forget it.
I wish I could agree entirely with the previous post. I worked in and on the fringes of the power industry for a while, and I pride myself as an educated observer on these issues. Indeed, utilities have traditionally been publicly regulated as natural monopolies (the thinking here being that the cost of power industry infrastructure is high enough that it makes little sense to build duplicate systems--a logic which, when not applied to the US mobile phone industry gave us 4-5 lousy, incompatible, and overpriced systems). I worked for New York State as an energy analyst, next to a MacKenzie consultant at the time when MacKenzie led the charge for power deregulation, a move which has been pretty much a total disaster, not least of all because the public now has less transparency with the power industry, so we really cannot know what the deals are. (Ask Californians who paid billions in extortionate, manipulated tarriffs a few years back). Deregulation was intended to let the mysteries of the "free" market replace the in-the-open system of regulation. I would assume that Oklahoma, a state traditionally operated in large part by the energy industries, is not particularly transparent in these deals anyway.
But there's more... When I studied the French power company (EDF) in great depth a number of years ago, it became clear that implicit or hidden cross-subsidies (charging one group of consumers more than the cost of service in order to allow another group to pay less) were essentially a veiled sort of industrial policy. For example, the French state wanted to make French electro-metallurgical (read: aluminum) and electro-chemical industries globally advantaged, so they got cheap power as a result. Ironically, that apparently wasn't enough for the aluminum producers, as in the 1980s and 1990s they moved much of their processing to Canada, where Hydro-Quebec and Ontario Hydro were offered much lower rates, in part b/c (in Quebec, at least), they could flood huge expanses of Indian land with minimal compensation.
As a resident of Michigan, where the auto industry is in free-fall thanks to perhaps the world's most bone-headed corporate leadership, I've had the wonderful privilege of paying some of the highest residential power tarriffs in the US. Why? Because residential users are subsidizing the Big Three through the rate structure. (I should also mention that we have some of the worst roads in the US because our weight limits are twice those of our neighboring states, thereby encouraging the suppliers, etc, to stay within our boundaries; we therefore subsidize the auto industry through our gasoline and road-use taxes).
In the end, these subsidies might make sense--I don't think so personally, as it encourages a race among states to offer corporate welfare--but in a democracy we as citizens should have the right to know. EDF, the French power company, attacked me nastily when I made this argument; I've not pushed hard in Michigan, as politically, we are expected to be slobbering whores for GM, etc., political affiliations notwithstanding (yeah, my House Rep is John "Camaro" Dingell, a dim Dem).
Bottom line, governments can and probably should have it within their authority to advantage one group over another, but that should be fully out in the open. When Oklahoma explicitly creates a system for obscuring the process, citizens lose. The problem is less, really, than one of corruption and sweetheart deals (tho OK has a long and ugly history of crooked relations b/w politicians and Big Oil), but the more "virtuous" practice of industrial policy conducted in the shadows.
Good question, as is its complement, "how much power is needed"? Given that a huge portion of the power used in data centers is cast off as waste heat, which then has to be countered with air conditioning, especially in muggy climes like the Carolinas, I'm surprised that there's so little thought to locating in colder climates (Minnesota, Montana with lots of coal-fired juice, or Quebec, Ontario with ample hydro). In such places waste heat could be an asset, not a cost, especially when applied to space heating for non-server areas such as office or residential space. Hell, I've even heard rumors that waste heat can be used for greenhouse vegetable farming--the French do it near their nuke plants.
In a practical sense, the calculations of net power cost are fairly easy to do by figuring in the cost savings from avoided air conditioning and heating costs. I'd imagine that this approach could well trump the advantages of cheap power in the Bonneville hydro region. As for availability, I understand that the Canadians overbuilt power capacity in anticipation of supplying the US, given the difficulties of siting new plants here.
Might this therefore be a consequence of MS' notorious history of trying to develop its own in-house "java"? Point of info requested: Does MS software mangle AJAX implementations often? If so, this is only the beginning of the headaches.
In practice, few scientists actually try to replicate each others' experiments, as the time/expense involved in reinventing the wheel is formidable and it offers little new knowledge. That end of a review is usually covered by reputation and trust (and the assumption that if the data has been faked, one's reputation is destroyed). As most reviewers are presumably quite familiar with the knowledge domain in question, they know pretty well what the data should look like. Of course, if a later researcher cannot build on someone else's previous work the integrity of the data does come into question, but that's usually much later.
Peer review is usually concerned with the credibility of the claims and the framing of the argument--essentially the validity of the conclusions being offered based on the evidence as presented. The ruling principle here is parsimony, that the conclusions don't overstep the explanatory apparatus on offer.
Indeed. I'm working on a prior-art project for the gaming industry and it seems that all one had to do to get a patent in that sandbox was to say, "attached to a gaming machine". Hence, a touch-screen is not patentable in itself, but "attached to a gaming machine" it is. Ditto for USB connectors, graphics chips, etc.
Let's not confuse issues and techniques here. My understanding of net neutrality as it's being discussed is that all packets should be considered equal, so that nobody will be alowed to slow-lane packets based on either their content (.torrent packets, for example) or origin/destination (google.com, comcast.net, etc). A measure of that sort would not prevent ISPs--Comcast, in my case at home--from having tiered services. Indeed, Comcast chokes my upload speed to about 35 KB/sec; if I want a faster speed, I have to pay more. It sucks (esp since I know that it would cost Comcast nothing to provide me with that service, given the low load on my leg of their network), but it's legit, implemented through a choke between essentially their nearest server and my connection. That s not what's being challenged in this debate; the real question is whether various actors in the network will be allowed to peel open packets or read addresses and discriminate accordingly. I have yet to see a compelling argument for justifying the latter. Yes, there've been claims that it's a QoS issue, yet my understanding is that the processing load associated with traffic discrimination at the internet backbone level would itself generate unacceptable latencies.
Excuse me, but I each info literacy and tech literacy, and I've studied pedagogy for a number of years. That said, even with my years of study, I can't dig through the facile "critical thinking vs. learning the basics" dichotomy. Years ago I was appalled watching a French schoolchild learning grammar by rote memorization (using language cadences, not knowledge of grammar), realizing that that learning model is ostensibly the opposite of critical thinking or learning to learn. I asked around, and indeed, discovered that the rote model prevails there, as it does in many places outside the US. I then looked at the baccalaureate exam taken by French college-bound HS "seniors" (they have a slightly different grade-level config) and realized that the critical-thinking skills needed to do well on it surpassed what I've seen in many of the best US college seniors at the best US schools. I sure as Hell can't understand how they learn those skills, but they do. Compared to many of the top-end India Institutes of Tech grads I teach now (themselves India's best-of-the-best), the French HS seniors are brilliant, as many of the IIT grads keep looking for the right-or-wrong answer, incapable of understanding that the most important questions don't have those.
As for the other discussion here of tech vs info literacy (I address both in my teaching), the distinction is relatively simple. Info literacy is largely propositional knowledge ("what is," and how to make judgments about it--often embracing a lot of critical thinking). Tech literacy is largely procedural knowledge ("how-to", and the basic propositional knowledge it takes to understand that). In practice, the two interweave, but the content and pedagogy of the two are very different, as are the cognitive processes required to master them. Example: deep propositional knowledge requires understanding not only coding systems, but the conceptual foundations that go into building structures of code, deep procedural knowledge masters how one can use those codes and structures to write applications. A good CS student has to master both, while a code monkey need only master the latter. That's why the CS grads from Carnegie-Mellon, for example, are far more info and tech literate than the grads of programming curricula in community colleges.
No, you don't get it. The core issue is about certifying "industry standard" and who is the certifying body. Hey, I'm Diebold, and through a side door I fund am "e-voting standards organization' and surprise!, my products are certified as "industry standard." Whether they actually work reliably is not the question. It's like having 4,000 of the 5,000 dentists on Proctor and Gamble's payroll recommending Crest toothpaste.
Forgive me, but I beg to disagree. I'm related to a very famous poet who died in 1963, yet whose copyrights were extended under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (you know, the one Sonny Bono hustled before he skiied into a tree). When CTEA was upheld a couple of years ago, the ground around the poet's grave in Bennington rumbled and a whole spate of new poems erupted from the earth. So yes, the dead do respond to economic incentives.
Of course Larry Lessig, that ever-subversive law faculty member at Stanford (which houses the Hoover Institute, a hotbed of anti-property Red subversion) was quick to note that some of the signers on the UK musicians' petition were dead (), yet as usual, he ignored how much more productive dead artists are when offered the appropriate incentives.
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Indeed, and with the case at hand in the Gulf, thanks to those dispersants, quite of bit of the oil is now a sort of emulsified goo. It has a specific gravity just about equal to that of the ambient seawater (so it hangs in suspension) and even if it could somehow be made to surface, it won't burn. AFAIK, there are no credible plans to get rid of that stuff. I'd imagine that it prolly clogs up fish gills quite well, too.
While the distinction between marketing and distribution is a good conceptual heuristic, in practice the two overlap, esp in p2p environments. "Distribution" on p2p systems raises the attention level (or mind-share) of others on the system. That mind-share piece is precisely the sort of thing that marketers are seeking. We have to acknowledge that attention is a very valuable commodity in the information economy, yet many analysts are blind to the fact that it's the only commodity in really short supply. Simply posting torrents does indeed increase mind-share, and it's that angle that the R*AA is also loath to admit.
If it's only about trademark, the legal standard is (and I paraphrase), "the possibility of confusion in the mind of the average person." By that standard, I think Hasbro's gonna lose, as "Scrabble" and "Scrabulous" don't seem interchangeable to me at all. Remember that PTO allowed Western Publishing to take the walking fingers of Yellow Pages, put a small line through it, and considered that sufficiently different to avoid infringement--despite the fact that most consumers didn't notice the difference. Western built an entire business off of that confusion. Scrabulous isn't even close.
Many universities routinely delete server logs a couple times or more a week, in large part b/c they indeed see no use to waste the space and staff time involved in storing them. The **AAs of course don't like this for the reasons noted in this discussion, but sadly, the gov't "terrorist" hunters don't either. There's been a move in the EU to require ISPs to archive logs for up to 2, maybe three years, so that they can (supposedly mine them and preemptively identify the bad guys. Of course, it's a fool's errand what with the obvious risks of false positives. Fortunately in the US the "save America from the terrorists"-branded politicians (Shrub, Rudy, etc) are simply too IT illiterate to go this direction (and hopefully, they won't read this post).
This is where things start to get very scary, ie, when Unis and other ISPs start being forced to spend their own resources to support the wacky agendas of other parties, be they media monopolies or ministries of fear. I know quite a few university sysadmins, and to them it's an ethical issue: it's a moral duty to protect the privacy of users, especially from prying third parties. Let's hope they push back.
Deficit government financing currently follows a simple model. Much of the current deficit comes from the massive tax cuts given to the wealthy when Bush came to power--we were in the black on current accounts when he took office. Now, instead of paying the taxes they would have paid under the previous arrangement, the wealthy beneficiaries of those tax cuts can take the same money and buy T-Bills and get both their money and a boatload of interest back. Great deal for them, lousy for the rest of us (and later generations)who end up financing the deal with our taxes.
My favorite part of the article was where it noted that the companies are considering trying to snag a cut of the artists' touring and gee-gaw revenue! I remember that in the 1970s, bands toured in order to help sell their albums, where their "real" money came from. With record companies offering even top artists ever-shabbier deals, touring is now the main source of income for bands--even with TicketMaster slurping up a huge cut. Isn't there some adage about geese and golden eggs, esp as the record companies are only intermediaries, and greedy ones at that?
Face it, the record companies are obsolete. They face a fundamental information problem--how to figure out what listeners want--but their info-feedback loop is desperately obsolete: produce it, market it, and hope it sells. Or, in the case of the Times Mag article, hire some guru who has a better clue. They've yet to discover this thing called the Internet[s], except insofar as people use it to "steal" "their" content. If we've learned enything with the Net, it's that info-iteration loops can be completed very rapidly and cheaply--we don't need to spend $millions to discover a flop. (As I'll soon see when my comments here are rated, and--weep, weep--trashed).
They are also obsolete because they do nothing that can't be done by other parties more cheaply and fairly. Do we really need these dinosaurs sucking out 60% of the revenue from a revenue stream that could be passing more simply between listeners and musicians? Not to be immodest, but I laid this all out in an article in the current issue of FirstMonday. We need not despise the record companies to realize that they should go the way of buggy-whip makers and store-front airplane ticket vendors--and, let's hope, residential real-estate agents.
Why not just post it anywhere on the Web, allow time for the Internet Archive (archive.org) to scrape it, then use their record as the timestamp? Seems to me that you could prolly also arrange something through creativecommons.
You are 100% correct. What usually causes a bubble is the BS pedaled by those puffed-up MBA "stock analysts." Think of housing: analysts kept hyping financially-thin high-risk lenders b/c the returns were SO fat, even if it couldn't last.
An even more disturbing example is how we got investors to build the Internet fiber backbone for us... Think on this. Companies like Level 3, PSINet, GlbalCrossing, etc were darlings of Wall St analysts b/c they were (in the 90s) the "next big thing." Assuming (correctly) that the Net was THE FUTURE, Wall St boneheads seemed to assume that anyone building infrastructure for it would make off with billions.
What those dummies neglected to notice is that the fiber backbone had such huge capacity that it was way easy, almost inevitable, to "overbuild" in the sense that with virtually unlimited carrying capacity, the backbone owners/installers couldn't charge enough to cover their vast capital expenditures. (Remember, this was at the moment when Enron thought that they could develop a futures market in broadband---which turned out to be much like a futures market in seawater). The fiber-pullers in fact had no credible long-term business model beyond Wall St loving them. Once it became clear that there was no credible fat revenue stream for them, they went under, and the successor firms who bought those assets got them at a price that realistically reflected the revenue potential of the fiber. Long story short, as a nation the US got its fiber backbone on the cheap, thanks to gullible investors listening to the hype of the financial analysts. Thanks!
On the downside, those same analysts are apparently now convinced that 1. firing employees is always a good thing for a firm, even if it undermines the comapny's knowledge capital and skill base, and 2. any investment that can't be amortized in a year or less should be avoided, as should any firm that makes such investments. They are setting us up for long-term economic dry-rot, but hey, it keeps the rich happy, provided they can always find the "next big thing (©)," sufficiently hyped by the boys in suits.
So yeah, Web 2.0 might be a *financial* bubble, but like the tech boom of the 1990s, there's some very solid stuff there, and once the smoke clears and the greedy have either gotten cooked or rich, we'll just keep innovating, albeit for different employers if we're in the private sector. Wouldn't it be nice if our economy weren't held hostage by the analysts and their greedy clients? Maybe we could then live in economic security amidst innovation.
Exactly. Think about GPS-equipped cars, given that most driving is done on known routes--known to the point of absolute boredom. Do we need a map to get to work or the supermarket? Now, are you willing to pay an extra grand for that feature in your car, given that you might use it 2-3 times a year? I don't think so. Reminds me of how J&R's ads in the NY Times try to sell GPS as a way to save fuel. Puhleeze! Very good in rental cars, tho, where we can assume the driver is unfamiliar with the surroundings.
There's something deeper here, and it's about familiarity, and that's something that doesn't translate well into IT, as it's all about informal, non-structured knowledge--which defies easy mapping. Before we embark on trying to get fine-grained on defining location, from an interface perspective, we need to figure out a way to background what we already know so we don't have to navigate through an ocean of extraneous BS. (This is akin to me always looking for the "do it again, like last time" key combination, instead of having to work through several layers of commands/menus).
The point is, the capacity of our IT systems to inundate us with more info is apparently limitless, and piling on more info--locational, recommended/referred, etc--is self-defeating unless we can navigate it.
My personal IT Rule #1: what we need is not more info, but better filters. This is not about info overload, really, but about the need to develop solid algorithms to background intelligently what we don't want and to do decent second-guessing at what we do want. The MIT Media Lab understood this a decade or more ago, but got sidetracked on emotive robots and laptops that would magically rescue African children from their poverty. Clippy, for all her annoying intrusiveness and dull-wittedness, should have been a start, "understanding" users and their contexts, and "learning" about them. Compare her to the much-better contextual help in OpenOffice, and we might get at a starting point.
In short, remember the 1970s agenda of appropriate technologies. It's all about context, not gizmos.
Indeed. For a number of years all of the states and provinces with Great Lakes shorelines have had a multistate[/province] compact/contract that is supposed to have some oversight on this sort of thing. I assure you that the govs of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota--and of course, our fabulous governor here in Michigan--will lean hard on Daniels, et al for this.
Indeed, even here in Michigan, where we have the worst unemployment in the US (thanks to our economy being run by the most boneheaded auto execs imaginable), this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen. In part, that's b/c we've been here before; as myriad auto plants and suppliers have shut down over the past couple of decades we've been saddled with remediation costs for the brownfields they left behind. Believe me, the Bushies aren't about to support federal funding to clean up those messes. Just try building the "high-tech, knowledge-driven economy of the future" on poisoned ground.
Wrong. Corporations are essentially "legal persons" pursuant the 1886 Santa Clara Railroad case decided by the Supreme Court. Most European countries actually passed legislation at about the same time, creating this new legal entity. The rationale was that with this odd legal construction, liability for the new entity would be limited to the company's assets and not reach into the pockets of the owners--otherwise known as, "incorporation means never having to say you're sorry." Until Santa Clara, the only other businesses were sole proprietorships and partnerships, neither of which provided limited liability, and governmental charters creating limited liability entities with pretty narrowly-construed missions and time frames. Example: a group of entrepreneurs would want, about 1830, to build a bridge across the Ohio River; they'd go to Harrisburg (PA's capital) and get the legislature to charter and entity such as "Pittsburgh Iron Bridge Company." It'd have limited liability, but would dissolve once the bridge was built and it couldn't engage in other business without further approvals.
The most perverse side of Santa Clara is that it used the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment as justification. Recall that the core purpose of the 14th was to extend the Bill of Rights to the states so that the former slave states couldn't pass legislation disenfranchising the freedmen. Following the deal cut after the 1876 elections (a tie that went to the House, where the southern Dems let the Repub candidate for pres take the job on the condition that Reconstruction--military occupation of the South, strong protections of freedmen, etc--end), one of the slimiest moves of the US Gov't (comparable to Bush v. Gore), freedmen's rights were largely ignored.
In short, SCOTUS used an amendment authored to protect ex-slaves in order to give special rights to businessmen. Capitalism and human rights certainly have little connection to each other, at least in this case.
You're correct for the most part, of course. Most university rules prohibit users from willy-nilly hanging WiFi routers off of available open ether connections, but I've never heard of any enforcement against it, save where the routers interfere with existing infrastructure. In my own faculty office I sometimes plug in an AirPort Express, unauthenticated, to allow students to have access when we meet there, as the ambient official WiFi signal is too flaky to be useful in that location. I also occasionally do that in seminar and classrooms for the same reason. I've sometimes forgotten to unplug the router, thereby leaving wide-open, non-traceable access to the Net. Can the U get angry about that? Sure, but it's a minor violation of rules, not a piracy-facilitation issue. Were **AA to try and litigate that, the implication would be that all WiFi routers would have to be centrally registered and WAP-enabled by law, and that ain't gonna happen. 802.11g connections are usually fast enough for credible p2p, and I assume 802.11n will be even better in such a scenario.
For that matter, any student can walk into a nearby coffee shop and connect to a free, open WiFi connection and d/l to their heart's content. Even if the MAC addresses are logged, so what? There's no dB with those numbers that's universal or widely available.
Kjella is 100% correct. There are provisions in the otherwise despicable DMCA (US-only, of course) that explicitly penalize "fishing"-based IP claims. It'd be great to see EFF to sue RIAA on that one.
There's actually an interesting historical example of Dvorak success. At the outset of WW2, the US Navy decided for efficiency reasons to use Dvorak across their units. This was easy, as there was minimal relearning, given that the male desk jockeys on those keyboards were mostly new to typing anyway (remember that until the 1980s, "typing" was defined as women's work, and when men started typing on computers in large numbers the task was renamed to "keyboarding" in order to avoid threatening masculinity).
So the Navy trained thousands of men to use Dvorak and ordered up a mess of Dvorak-configured typewriters. It all worked famously, but at the end of the war, demobilization meant that those guys largely went to masculine jobs and quit typing, which went back and regendered to a feminine task, and women were, of course, almost all QWERTY. The Dvorak typewriters were junked and the experience largly disappeared from memory. In the end, it was one massive experiment that indeed showed the better efficiency of Dvorak--and the fact that it was all about social and workforce issues, and really very little about keyboard configs.
I'm amazed at the selectiveness with which libertarians apply their anti-state ideology. They will not be credible until they oppose things like probate courts, registers of deeds, intellectual property laws, USCITA, and, of course, the biggest of "big govenment" monsters, the Dept of "Defense".
They are about as consistent as their "federalist" friends, who support "states rights" until states allow abortions, legalize medical marijuana or the right to die, or, most outstandingly, try to run their own vote counting if there's a danger of Democrats winning (see Bush v. Gore, 2000, in which the "federalists" on SCOTUS explicitly said in essence, "yeah, we're ignoring federalism in this case, so don't consider this a precedent").
Libertarians, federalists, call them what you will; they are merely trying to place an intellectual gloss over efforts to reinforce the power of the haves over the rest of us. Consistency? Forget it.
I wish I could agree entirely with the previous post. I worked in and on the fringes of the power industry for a while, and I pride myself as an educated observer on these issues. Indeed, utilities have traditionally been publicly regulated as natural monopolies (the thinking here being that the cost of power industry infrastructure is high enough that it makes little sense to build duplicate systems--a logic which, when not applied to the US mobile phone industry gave us 4-5 lousy, incompatible, and overpriced systems). I worked for New York State as an energy analyst, next to a MacKenzie consultant at the time when MacKenzie led the charge for power deregulation, a move which has been pretty much a total disaster, not least of all because the public now has less transparency with the power industry, so we really cannot know what the deals are. (Ask Californians who paid billions in extortionate, manipulated tarriffs a few years back). Deregulation was intended to let the mysteries of the "free" market replace the in-the-open system of regulation. I would assume that Oklahoma, a state traditionally operated in large part by the energy industries, is not particularly transparent in these deals anyway.
But there's more... When I studied the French power company (EDF) in great depth a number of years ago, it became clear that implicit or hidden cross-subsidies (charging one group of consumers more than the cost of service in order to allow another group to pay less) were essentially a veiled sort of industrial policy. For example, the French state wanted to make French electro-metallurgical (read: aluminum) and electro-chemical industries globally advantaged, so they got cheap power as a result. Ironically, that apparently wasn't enough for the aluminum producers, as in the 1980s and 1990s they moved much of their processing to Canada, where Hydro-Quebec and Ontario Hydro were offered much lower rates, in part b/c (in Quebec, at least), they could flood huge expanses of Indian land with minimal compensation.
As a resident of Michigan, where the auto industry is in free-fall thanks to perhaps the world's most bone-headed corporate leadership, I've had the wonderful privilege of paying some of the highest residential power tarriffs in the US. Why? Because residential users are subsidizing the Big Three through the rate structure. (I should also mention that we have some of the worst roads in the US because our weight limits are twice those of our neighboring states, thereby encouraging the suppliers, etc, to stay within our boundaries; we therefore subsidize the auto industry through our gasoline and road-use taxes).
In the end, these subsidies might make sense--I don't think so personally, as it encourages a race among states to offer corporate welfare--but in a democracy we as citizens should have the right to know. EDF, the French power company, attacked me nastily when I made this argument; I've not pushed hard in Michigan, as politically, we are expected to be slobbering whores for GM, etc., political affiliations notwithstanding (yeah, my House Rep is John "Camaro" Dingell, a dim Dem).
Bottom line, governments can and probably should have it within their authority to advantage one group over another, but that should be fully out in the open. When Oklahoma explicitly creates a system for obscuring the process, citizens lose. The problem is less, really, than one of corruption and sweetheart deals (tho OK has a long and ugly history of crooked relations b/w politicians and Big Oil), but the more "virtuous" practice of industrial policy conducted in the shadows.
Good question, as is its complement, "how much power is needed"? Given that a huge portion of the power used in data centers is cast off as waste heat, which then has to be countered with air conditioning, especially in muggy climes like the Carolinas, I'm surprised that there's so little thought to locating in colder climates (Minnesota, Montana with lots of coal-fired juice, or Quebec, Ontario with ample hydro). In such places waste heat could be an asset, not a cost, especially when applied to space heating for non-server areas such as office or residential space. Hell, I've even heard rumors that waste heat can be used for greenhouse vegetable farming--the French do it near their nuke plants.
In a practical sense, the calculations of net power cost are fairly easy to do by figuring in the cost savings from avoided air conditioning and heating costs. I'd imagine that this approach could well trump the advantages of cheap power in the Bonneville hydro region. As for availability, I understand that the Canadians overbuilt power capacity in anticipation of supplying the US, given the difficulties of siting new plants here.
Might this therefore be a consequence of MS' notorious history of trying to develop its own in-house "java"? Point of info requested: Does MS software mangle AJAX implementations often? If so, this is only the beginning of the headaches.
So I guess women aren't allowed to be armed?
Peer review is usually concerned with the credibility of the claims and the framing of the argument--essentially the validity of the conclusions being offered based on the evidence as presented. The ruling principle here is parsimony, that the conclusions don't overstep the explanatory apparatus on offer.
Indeed. I'm working on a prior-art project for the gaming industry and it seems that all one had to do to get a patent in that sandbox was to say, "attached to a gaming machine". Hence, a touch-screen is not patentable in itself, but "attached to a gaming machine" it is. Ditto for USB connectors, graphics chips, etc.
Let's not confuse issues and techniques here. My understanding of net neutrality as it's being discussed is that all packets should be considered equal, so that nobody will be alowed to slow-lane packets based on either their content (.torrent packets, for example) or origin/destination (google.com, comcast.net, etc). A measure of that sort would not prevent ISPs--Comcast, in my case at home--from having tiered services. Indeed, Comcast chokes my upload speed to about 35 KB/sec; if I want a faster speed, I have to pay more. It sucks (esp since I know that it would cost Comcast nothing to provide me with that service, given the low load on my leg of their network), but it's legit, implemented through a choke between essentially their nearest server and my connection. That s not what's being challenged in this debate; the real question is whether various actors in the network will be allowed to peel open packets or read addresses and discriminate accordingly. I have yet to see a compelling argument for justifying the latter. Yes, there've been claims that it's a QoS issue, yet my understanding is that the processing load associated with traffic discrimination at the internet backbone level would itself generate unacceptable latencies.
Excuse me, but I each info literacy and tech literacy, and I've studied pedagogy for a number of years. That said, even with my years of study, I can't dig through the facile "critical thinking vs. learning the basics" dichotomy. Years ago I was appalled watching a French schoolchild learning grammar by rote memorization (using language cadences, not knowledge of grammar), realizing that that learning model is ostensibly the opposite of critical thinking or learning to learn. I asked around, and indeed, discovered that the rote model prevails there, as it does in many places outside the US. I then looked at the baccalaureate exam taken by French college-bound HS "seniors" (they have a slightly different grade-level config) and realized that the critical-thinking skills needed to do well on it surpassed what I've seen in many of the best US college seniors at the best US schools. I sure as Hell can't understand how they learn those skills, but they do. Compared to many of the top-end India Institutes of Tech grads I teach now (themselves India's best-of-the-best), the French HS seniors are brilliant, as many of the IIT grads keep looking for the right-or-wrong answer, incapable of understanding that the most important questions don't have those.
As for the other discussion here of tech vs info literacy (I address both in my teaching), the distinction is relatively simple. Info literacy is largely propositional knowledge ("what is," and how to make judgments about it--often embracing a lot of critical thinking). Tech literacy is largely procedural knowledge ("how-to", and the basic propositional knowledge it takes to understand that). In practice, the two interweave, but the content and pedagogy of the two are very different, as are the cognitive processes required to master them. Example: deep propositional knowledge requires understanding not only coding systems, but the conceptual foundations that go into building structures of code, deep procedural knowledge masters how one can use those codes and structures to write applications. A good CS student has to master both, while a code monkey need only master the latter. That's why the CS grads from Carnegie-Mellon, for example, are far more info and tech literate than the grads of programming curricula in community colleges.
No, you don't get it. The core issue is about certifying "industry standard" and who is the certifying body. Hey, I'm Diebold, and through a side door I fund am "e-voting standards organization' and surprise!, my products are certified as "industry standard." Whether they actually work reliably is not the question. It's like having 4,000 of the 5,000 dentists on Proctor and Gamble's payroll recommending Crest toothpaste.
Forgive me, but I beg to disagree. I'm related to a very famous poet who died in 1963, yet whose copyrights were extended under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (you know, the one Sonny Bono hustled before he skiied into a tree). When CTEA was upheld a couple of years ago, the ground around the poet's grave in Bennington rumbled and a whole spate of new poems erupted from the earth. So yes, the dead do respond to economic incentives.
Of course Larry Lessig, that ever-subversive law faculty member at Stanford (which houses the Hoover Institute, a hotbed of anti-property Red subversion) was quick to note that some of the signers on the UK musicians' petition were dead (), yet as usual, he ignored how much more productive dead artists are when offered the appropriate incentives.