You can make a pretty good prediction of where the rock will land because projectile motion is a linear system (small changes in the initial conditions produce small changes in the final result) and the disturbances impose very small forces on the rock relative to its general motion.
If you want a challenge that's comparable to predicting the weather, try to guess where your rock will actually stop after it finishes bouncing and rolling. Yeah, you can make a good guess about the initial point of impact, but then you have to try and predict its attitude at the moment of impact and how it will interact with the ground (the flat surface will skid and bounce, the sharp point will dig in and cause the rock to tumble), and each new impact induces forces that are large relative to the rock's current linear and angular momentum.
Weather prediction.. especially long-term weather prediction.. is a model-based nonlinear science. Model-based science is iffy anyway, because models are so easy to come by. As one aeronautical engineer put it, "the problem with models is that they only let you study what you already know." Long-tem predictions of nonlinear systems are also questionable, because over time, nonlinear systems amplify small errors in the initial values or assumptions to a point where they completely overwhelm the accurate predictions. To put it another way, the farther ahead you try to predict a nonlinear system, the greater the probability that your result will end up being completely bogus.
Added to that is the fact that climatologists know they don't understand all the rules of the system yet. The elephant in the dining room is the cloud system, which is vastly nonlinear and has a huge impact on both short-term and long-term weather trends. Clouds trap heat, move water, carry energy, and change the planetary albedo, and we have almost nothing in terms of a general model to explain how they work. Trying to make long-term weather predictions without taking the clouds into account is like the old joke where the physicist says, "first, ve approximate ze cow as a perfect sphere."
In science, a person's agenda is irrelevant. The researchers can be pedophile Nazi cannibals for all the universe cares, but if their theory correlates with observable fact, their theory is worth taking seriously. Period.
There's way too much public discussion that treats science like some kind of popularity contest.. 'truth' is what the cool people say, and refutation from the uncool camp can be discarded simply by sneering at its source. People who engage in that kind of bullshit surrender their right to call their opinions 'scientific'.
The AS article discusses the history of the thermohaline conveyor and the scientific discussion surrounding it, provides a general description of the model the author used to test the idea that the conveyor has a primary influence on keeping western Europe warm, and even discusses some of the contradictions inherent in the media-hyped notion of a globally-warmed ice age (the prevailing model of global warming says the difference in temperatures between the poles and the equator will get smaller. Shutting off the conveyor will theoretically make the northern latitudes colder, thus *increasing* the temperature gradient. You can't have it both ways at once). Then the author discusses an alternate mechanism for European warming (topgraphically forced tropospheric deviations) that's perfectly consistent with orthodox climatological science.
If the author got his facts wrong, point to the errors. If he failed to include relevant information, show it. If you can find holes in the author's reasoning, tell us what they are. If you have a different climate model that you think carries more correlation to observed reality, let's see it. That's scientific discussion.
But if all you can do is piss on the fundamental principles of science because this article offends your preconcieved notions, please do science a favor and shut the fuck up.
Taking the risk that you aren't joking, you have the cause and effect reversed. First the orbit changed, then the animals died off.
The earth's orbit *does* change over time. Small gravitational influences from the other planets in the solar system add up over time, moving us a little closer to, or farther from, the sun. To make things even more fun, we can't predict exactly what will happen or when, since it's mathematically impossible to predict the paths of three or more orbiting bodies, except in a few special cases.
When you can connect to you home desktop with 300 gigs of MP3's wirelessly via your cell phone.....why even bother carrying around an extra device.
Because under the current encoding schemes, digital music consumes about 1-2 megabytes per minute. To a very loose approximation, that's about 250 K/s or 250 kbps. The current data transfer rates for cell phone networks are roughly the same as dialup: 50-100 kbps. At those rates, it would take longer to load the song than play it. 3G broadband runs around 4-700 kbps, which is good enough to actually play the song in real time with a less-than-perfect signal.
Because the phone companies charge a premium for 3G, and a 1000-minute plan will buy you 1 hour of music a day for half a month (17 days).. not counting, y'know, phone calls.
Because wireless communication eats power, and 75 megs of data transfer an hour eats lots of power. People don't like carrying a battery the size of a brick everywhere they go.
Because people will get annoyed when the wireless network drops their connection halfway through a song, or when they can't contact the 300 gig server at home at all because they're outside their coverage area. They're also likely to get annoyed when the phone shuts off the music every time they get a call.
By contrast, my iPod carries 30 gigs of music and can play music all day, every day, for free.
First, for all the speculation, the Zune is still an unreleased product due to hit the market Real Soon Now. No Zune in the wild has actually wrapped DRM around a CCL'd file contrary to its license, yet.
Second, it isn't Microsoft's fault for building a DRM'd channel for sharing music any more than it's Gnutella or Bittorrent's fault for building a non-DRM'd channel for sharing music. The guilt for applying DRM to a CCL'd file by sharing it over Zune wifi will fall on the shoulders of the consumer who actually shares the file, just like it falls on the shoulders of the person who actually strips the DRM off a file and posts it to a P2P network. The legal arguments and precedents apply equally well either way.
Taking a large leap of faith and assuming that both the Zune and its wifi-sharing thing become massively popular, this will simply create a climate where anti-DRM-licensed music has a disadvantage in terms of distribution.. also assuming that the people who licensed the files choose to prosecute people who share the files in a way that violates the license. Otherwise people will ignore the whole thing and the applied DRM, while technically illegal, will be a nonissue.
Actually, special relativity covers this pretty well.
The idea that the internal forces will balance is Newtonian. If we have a ping-pong ball bouncing back and forth in a horn-shaped chamber, we have two cases to consider: when the ball is close to the center, it bounces from one flat end to the other and the force of each bounce balances the force of the bounce at the opposite end. When the ball is close to the edge, it bounces from the large flat side and then hits a wall. The force of the impact with the wall transfers some energy from the ball to the chamber, and slows the ball down slightly. The energy transferred to the chamber has one component perpendicular to the chamber's axis, and that component moves the chamber sideways a little bit. There's also a component that's parallel to the chamber's axis, and that component precisely matches the loss of force when the ball hits the small flat side moving at a slightly lower speed.
Problem is, we're talking about photons. They don't have the option of slowing down.
When a photon loses energy by reflecting off the chamber wall, it can't lose speed, so it loses mass. The energy gained by the chamber wall is translated into heat, not linear motion. When the photon gets to the small end of the chamber, it's still moving at the speed of light, but has less effective mass, so it imparts less energy to the chamber with that reflection.
The energy is conserved properly, even if the traditional notion of Newtonian momentum isn't, and it's well established that relativistic mechanics don't preserve the Newtonian concepts of mass or momentum.
It's also worth noting that this isn't a perpetual motion machine. As soon as the whole system moves, the photons inside the chamber lose their energy and have to be re-excited.
As an aside, the team that writes the flight-control software for the space shuttle -- who arguably have some of the highest quality standards in the world of software -- demand an average of about one bug per thousand lines of code at the unit-test stage. First, most bugs show up at the boundary where two different subsystems interact, and it's more cost-effective to find those during the integration stage than at unit-test time.
More importantly, though, if they hit a patch where they consistently fail to find any bugs, they audit their testing procedures to make sure they aren't missing anything.
And just as a piece of related trivia, in _Applied Cryptography_, Bruce Schneier runs the numbers on the minimum amount of energy necessary to represent one bit of information at the quantum level, divides that into the current best estimate for the total energy of the universe, and shows that there isn't enough energy in the universe to completely clock (i.e.: start at zero and increment by one until you overflow and drop back to zero again) a 512-bit counter.
Enh.. it's not that bad. I've been giving you the harsh view because you were working with a couple of common-but-incorrect ideas about law: that being able to make a legally-defensible argument means that you'll automatically win, and with that being the case, that lawyers are basically unnecessary.
The thing you have to remember is that a court's decision is the final, sudden-death resolution of a disagreement that can't be settled any other way. People always have the option to negotiate an agreement between themselves before going to court. Heck, they can even reach an agreement halfway through a trial if the rulings put one party or the other at a serious disadvantage. Nobody who understands the law says, "see you in court" as a first option.
I've also skipped things that balance the scale, like pro-bono legal representation. A lot of people sued by the RIAA are being represented for free, because the lawyers themselves don't want to see the RIAA build a legally-admissible track record of victories. Then there are the judges.. they play a very important role in the law, because they balance what's written down in the rules against what's actually more-or-less fair at the moment. If a big corporation tried to bury a single pro-bono lawyer in documents, that lawyer could say, "your honor, these guys are making things unnecessarily difficult. Would you please order them to reduce this mountain of crap to a list of bullet-points?" and depending on the situation, the judge might well do so. In extreme cases, the judge will even bend the rules or give the little guy procedural advice in order to level the playing field.
The adversarial-presentation-of-evidence policy also puts some limits on the value of sheer manpower. Not even a thousand lawyers can put a provably-untrue statement into the record if the other side is paying attention. That's another reason for using a lawyer: your opponent might be tempted to play fast and loose with his arguments if he knows you don't have the experience to double-check anything, but he'll be a lot more careful if he knows you have someone experienced (and capable of calling for sanctions) checking the books.
You also have to remember that lawyers (and litigation) cost money on both sides. The SCO -v- IBM trial shows an aggressive legal team pulling every trick in the book, but it also shows SCO spending money like mad.
In some ways, the law is like unix: it gives you the power to 'sudo rm -rf/' if you really want to, and doesn't show much sympathy if you don't RTFM before you do. That's both a blessing and a curse, depending on how you want to look at it, but the general consensus is that it's better than the alternatives.
The law has been around a long time, and a lot of very intelligent people have put a lot of effort into spotting the ways it can be abused and trying to find good ways of patching those holes. Yeah, there are some rough spots, but when you see clearly eggregious problems, it's usually because someone tried to do something pretty darned stupid in the first place.
Ok, but I don't see what kind of evidence would tilt such a case in the opponent's favor.
That's where we the 'wiggle room' thing comes into play.
Yes it's clearly legal to copy a work for archival purposes. OTOH, it's clearly illegal to use a digital master to make and distribute unlimted copies of the work. Trouble is, once the stuff's in a computer, the 'archival copy' and the 'digital master' are identical.
When a single thing can be used in two different ways, judges basically say, "I don't care what you call it, I want to know what you do with it." So if you want your "clearly legal fair-use copy" definition to stand up in court, you'll have to show that you -- and the public in general, since you're not the only person who can get a copy of these files -- behave in a way that's completely consistent with fair use, and clearly not consistent with illegal copying of a digital master.
Good luck with that.. you'll have about a billion pages worth of Napster/BitTorrent/Gnutella/Darknet traffic to explain away plausibly. And much of that traffic has already been ruled to be illegal copying, so you'll basically have to present an argument for why the previous courts were wrong.
Fact is, people do copy files illegally, so now we have to argue the question, "how much money are the record companies obligated to lose just to protect your right to make perfectly legal fair-use archival copies in this specific way?" The flip side of that question is, "how much of fair use does the public have to give up just to protect a record company's bottom line?"
These are not simple questions.
When the law says something is ok (or when prior rulings say so, in the US legal system), shouldn't you win more or less automatically?
I've pretty much dealt with that above, but the basically, "no." It's hard to find an issue where only one body of law comes into play. Most cases involve one party saying, "I define the situation as X, and according to this body of law and precedence, I clearly win," while the other party says, "I define the situation as Y, and according to this body of law and precedence, I clearly win."
And when you don't pay an expensive lawyer, how can you go bankrupt?
Time.
If the other guy dumps a hundred thousand documents on the table, your lawyer has to read and respond to each and every one of them. And while he's doing that, your opponent will have twenty lawyers building the next pile of stuff he'll have to respond to. Then there's expert testimony. If your opponent hires an expert (or ten) to define certain facts in a way that supports his case, you have to hire experts to refute those definitions. Then there's third-party discovery. If your opponent interviews a thousand ISPs and cherry-picks data to support his side of the case, you have to interview the same ISPs just to prove that your opponent did cherry-pick the data, and then you have to collect and present your own data.
And that's just the straightforward, indisputably ethical stuff. Dig through the Groklaw archives to see how an aggresive legal firm can game the system and make their opponent pay through the nose without even having demonstrated clear standing to bring the case to court in the first place.
Unfortunately, very few legal situations are ever 'quite clear'.
The law represents an attempt to find a balance between many different interests, and it can't do that with simple pass/fail, you-win/you-lose rules. There's a lot of wiggle room, and deciding a case is less a matter of saying, "this rule hands you the victory" and more one of deciding whether the scale tips more one way or the other.
As for why you need a lawyer, there are several good reasons. First, a lawyer knows what kinds of things you need to bring into court, and knows how to handle all the paperwork to bring them before the court properly. Second, a lawyer knows what kinds of arguments and evidence will tip the scale more your direction.. think of it as the difference between getting driving directions from a map, and getting directions from someone who knows where all the road construction is and how busy the roads are at any given time of day. Third, if you're going to court over an issue that's fairly common.. say you want to object to a ticket from a speed camera.. a lawyer might already have expert testimony on record in that district. She can just say, "I want to use this one again," where you'd have to hire the expert to write another report and go through all the paperwork of filing it for yourself.
Most important though, a lawyer knows how to keep your opponent's lawyer from gaining an unfair advantage.
See, the US legal system doesn't deal in 'truth'. It deals in evidence. And it accepts as 'evidence' any statement that both parties are willing to allow into court. In other words, your opponent can say, "the defendant agrees that he has no case" and if you let that statement go into the record, you lose. As far as the court is concerned, the fact that you allowed the statement to go into the record means you do agree with it. You have the option to object to it, tack qualifications onto it, or otherwise get your side of the story written into the record, but it's your job to do that, and no one else's.
A lawyer knows how to keep an eye on what's officially on record, and is ethically, professionally, and legally required to keep your from being bushwhacked that way.
Even so, a court battle pertty much boils down to "who can build the biggest pile of evidence that the other side can't throw out?" If your opponent has deep enough pockets, he can bankrupt you simply by piling up heaps of stuff or you to shoot down. He may not 'win' in a legal sense, but he can ruin your business and your life in the process of 'losing'.
Feed it to bacteria and let them generate new hydrocarbons.
Thermodynamically, we have to lose energy somewhere. It will always take more energy to go around the carbon -> hydrocarbon -> carbon + hydrogen -> water loop than we can capture from the hydrogen -> water phase. Obviously you know that, I'm just stating it for the sake of framing the discussion.
Getting back up the carbon -> hydrocarbon curve will be an enthalpic process, but bacteria can do it at a fairly low industrial cost. The bugs will burn far more energy producing the hydrocarbons than we can extract from the hydrogen -> water phase, but we humans don't have to care. We can just set big tanks of sludge out in the sunlight, and let the bugs do the rest.
Ideally, we'd be able to keep the carbon in a closed loop: bacterially hydrogenating it, dehydrogenating it during the energy production process, then starting all over again.
The big problem would be ramping up such a system industrially. The tanks of sludge in question would have to be huge, and I have no idea what dollar-cost petrochemical hydrocarbons would have to reach before it would be economically sensible to try building such a thing. Things would get better over time -- the industrial processes would get more efficient and people would breed strains of bugs that generate hydrocarbons faster and more efficiently -- but the initial payoff would be pretty low, and the costs would be high.
Sweatshop: (n) A working place where the conditions are shitty, the pay is shit, and, unless you want to eat shit, you have no choice but to work there.
Try pulling your head out of your ass long enough to read _The Jungle_ by Upton Sinclair. Then follow it up with _The Bitter Cry of the Children_ by John Spargo, and _How the Other Half Lives_ by Jacob Riis. The defining characteristic of a sweat-shop is its lack of even the most basic health and safety considerations. We're talking 'arms ripped off in machines with no guard rails' and 'dropping over dead from heatstroke' conditions.
Those conditions were normal here in the US a century ago. If you can show me documentation of conditions at the FoxConn factory that are even vaguely like the ones New York garment and factory workers tolerated in the 1900s, then I'll grant you the use of the word 'sweatshop'. If you can't, I'll call you a pompous little jackoff throwing loaded words around to hide the fact that he doesn't have an argument based on actual facts.
The fact is that, regardless of local median wage, the people working at this factory are picking up marketable skills. If they do decide to go look for another job, their time at FoxConn will A) allow them to acquire enough money to move to a different job market, and B) give them a much better chance of finding a job after they leave.
To understand that statement, you have to stop thinking in first-world terms, where we devote significant resources to instilling basic marketable skills into anyone who makes in through 8th grade. In third-world countries, poor people survive by picking recyclable materials out of garbage dumps.. and we're not talking about EPA-regulated American landfills. We're talking about miles of mixed household, medical, and industrial waste, complete with toxic fumes and sludge. 80-90% of waste-pickers are women, and most are the primary source of income for their family. Most have husbands who are alcoholics or drug addicts. Most support themselves, their husbands (and his habits), their children, and one or more extended family members. They have no marketable skills, they gain no marketable skills from picking garbage, and they can't stop picking garbage long enough to acquire marketable skills and still feed their families. To a person in that situation, the prospect of working for a company that provides housing, food, medical and recreational facilities, a climate-controlled non-toxic working environment, and gives them skills that will give them a fighting chance to maintain that standard of living even if they decide to leave the company.. well, that's a definite step up.
It's also a fact that the only documented 'abuse' in this whole story was a FoxConn policy that allowed workers to sign up for more than 60 hours of work per week, rather than capping their overtime at a maximum of 60 hrs/week. That's not "60 hours mandatory," it's, "not stopping people after they've volunteered to put in another 20." And that policy has now been changed, at least in the 15% of the plant that serves Apple. A related fact is that the biggest complaint among workers was that there wasn't enough overtime during the off-peak seasons.
Okay skipping the whole thing about the fact that you have to separate the hydrogen and oxygen before burning them
Minor technical point, but it is possible to liberate hydrogen from compounds with lower disassociation energies, like hydrocarbons. It takes about 460 kJ/mol to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but only about 415 kJ/mol to split methane into hydrogen and carbon. Running (CH4 + O2) -> (C + 2H2 + O2) -> (C + 2H2O) produces an energy yield of about 45 kJ/mol.
Water has a molar weight of 18 g, so there are about 55 moles in a liter of water. 55 * 45 == 2475 kilojoules of energy per liter of water produced. Water has a specific heat of 4.18 kJ/l-C, so the energy liberated in generating a liter of water equals about 590 liter-degrees-C.. enough to take 6 liters of water from just above ice to just below boiling.
Granted, that doesn't come anywhere close to running a house for a day, but it's a much better yield than you'd get from splitting water electrolytically and putting it back together again. Even taking the inevitable losses into account, it's possible to end up with a positive energy yield.
And while this is pure blue-sky speculation, I read an article the other day about a team of materials scientists who'd created a plastic with alternating superhydrophlic and superhydrophobic regions.. the stuff basically strains water right out of the air. Assuming someone could do the same for methane, it would be theoretically possible to pull some cow-farts out of the atmosphere and generate power while we're at it.
We really need to recognize the differences between the two companies.
Microsoft is a software consolidation house. They look for what's already out there and popular, and build a more or less standard version of that technology into their platform. That isn't bad. Almost every form of software does end up being dominated by one or two major implementations in the long run, and it's darn good business sense to try and own as many of those implementations as possible. That's one of the reasons Microsoft will continue to be relevant in the marketplace even if it does lose its OS-and-application-suite lock-in. It'll just shift from an 'upgrade treadmill' strategy to an 'integrated solutions' strategy, and will continue to play a significant role in the software market for years to come.
Apple, OTOH, can't make enough money on consolidation to stay afloat. It has to find (or build) new markets and cash in on the early adopters before the product becomes so well-known that consolidation houses like Microsoft can take over. In the long run, Microsoft stands a very good chance of owning a healthy chunk of the digital music market. Apple has dominance in that market now, thanks to the combination of hardware integration with the iPod and the RIAA-induced significance of its FairPlay DRM, but in the long run that will likely fade away. We'll probably see enough artists opening their work under less restrictive terms than the RIAA would like before we see the RIAA itself give up on DRM, but eventually there will be a profitable catalog of music available under terms that allow other vendors to sell music for the iPod. At that point, it will make sense for Apple to license FairPlay, and Microsoft will be able to bring its financial endurance to bear.
And by then, Apple will be going for profits in some new and completely different market that isn't valuable enough for Microsoft to try and consolidate yet.
'Copying' is a vaguely correct term for the natural flow of technology from a company that makes its money by finding the version of a new product that's good enough to create an expanding market, to a company that consolidates the good ideas already in known, profitable markets and builds something good enough to become a standard product. It definitely has some topspin to it, and there are more moderate ways to discuss the issue if you really want to be balanced. But let's get real: we're talking about advertising, here. The goal is to create a positive impression for the client's product while not saying anything outright false. And the event in question was an Apple Developer's conference. Show me a Linux conference with absolutely no MS-bashing, or a Microsoft conference that doesn't engage in its own spin (anyone remember the "Windows 95: so good the feds want to make it illegal" bumper stickers floating around Seattle about ten years ago?), and we'll talk about the denotative accuracy of the statements Apple made at WWDC.
No, the sheer mental cost of remembering how the offscreen information is organized is more than most people can handle. Either you have to memorize the positions and contents of Y layered windows on X different desktops, or you have to train yourself to follow some kind of 'this information goes on this desktop' work scheme, or you have to play 'hunt like hell' for that one window you were using five tasks ago, which has the information you want.
Those problems are intrinsic to virtual desktops. The whole point of virtual desktops is to make some (and usually most) of the user's working data invisible at any given time, and any time you make information invisible, you impose a load on the user's memory. In most cases, people switching between apps do so because they're trying to accomplish something and their minds are focused on doing that job, not on remembering how all the offscreen information is arranged. The 'what I'm doing right now' task and the 'keeping the virtual desktop organized' tasks end up competing for the user's mental resources.
It takes skill to use virtual desktops effectively and efficiently. Most casual computer users lack those skills, and for those people, the virtual desktop environment ends up being more of a nuisance than it's worth.
People who use a kernel that's basically a reimplementation of Unix -- itself a dead-simple reimplementation of some core ideas from Multics -- whose GUI projects are doing their damndest to be Windows from ten years ago, and who get excited about progress in OpenOffice, which is more or less a knockoff of MS Office, have limited grounds for getting snarky about anyone else "invent[ing] it again for the first time."
The sheer novelty of an idea is only one thing you can get excited about. Quality of execution for an existing idea is another. F/OSS folks have legitimate grounds for gettng excited about progress in OpenOffice, and Mac users have legitimate grounds for getting excited about Spaces.
I appreciate your respectful and interesting response,
Thank you, in turn, for an equally polite and well-considered follow-up. You make some good points, and I think we have generally similar views of the situation, even if we approach the matter from different directions.
It's true that the sheer volume of experimentation currently underway does undercut the effects of communication among agents. OTOH, I think I'm working with a much more coarse-grained model of communication than you are. You discussed the problems of getting accurate measurements of adwords performance in specific markets: that's very true, and has a lot of value in a more or less classical economic model that assumes agents are intelligent, rational, and want the most perfect information they can get. But that model works as an asymptotic forecast of agent behavior over the long term. It doesn't do so well with respect to the short term. The classic summary of that problem is that "according to all the best classical economic models, the stock market shouldn't even exist."
I'm looking at short-term communication between agents which is usually inaccurate -- and frequently irrational -- but which does have a strong impact on the short-term behavior of agents in any given market. It's the stuff that drives pump-and-dump fraud schemes. The very fact that the words 'Google click-fraud' have made it to the mainstream media will make a lot of people leery of the adwords program, regardless of its actual performance for them in their specific market. Call it the counterbalance to the people you mentioned, who are just happy to see a positive surplus in traffic. My gut says that the people willing to try adwords on the hope that they'll see some kind of positive surplus are the same ones who'll decide not to bother if there's too much generic anti-Google zeitgeist in the air.
And while you'll get no argument from me that Google can take advantage of the current inefficiencies of communication and lack of a reliable baseline from which to measure adwords performance over the short term, I think doing so would be a phenomenally stupid move on their part.. a tactical victory that leads to strategic loss, roughly like a low initial sale price tied to a very high TCO, on the purchasing end.
In the long term, any reputation Google acquires for knowingly engaging in fraud, or even ignoring fraud that it reasonably could have spotted, will reduce the potential customer's perception of the utiilty of the adwords program. A reduction of perceived utility turns into a reduction in sale price over the long run, because price eventually does balance utility. Any profit Google skims from fraud over the short term will amortize out very badly over the long term. And in almost any business, the vast majority of the money is in the long term.
The optimum cash strategy for Google would be to skim a certain amount of extra profit from fraud while they can, but to make sure that skimming is highly deniable, and to retire any skimmable fraud pattern that looks like it might become public knowledge before it blows up in Google's face. The only trouble is, that strategy takes more work than just trying to build the best product possible.
You've got three different bodies of law all mushed together -- copyright, license law, and contract law -- and are dangerously close to joining Microsoft in declaring the GPL illegal.
Copyright law gives the rights holder the power to establish the license under which the work will be distributed. That's all. You're right that copyright law per se doesn't apply to use, only to distribution and copying. License law, OTOH, does give the rights holder the power to set restrictions upon use.
The term 'license' originally meant 'permission to enter my land'. Entering somene else's land without permission is called 'trespassing'. Now, if I give you permission to enter my land, I have every right to impose restrictions on your behavior while you're there. If I say, "no hunting," you can't come onto my land, shoot my deer, and then say, "the restriction is invalid because I never signed a contract." The default state under the law is that you have no right to be on my property, period. I waived my right to have to arrested for trespassing simply for being on my land when I gave you the 'no hunting' license, but you can't extend that license beyond the terms that I set.
Contract law is irrelevant to licensing issues, because the fundamental legal questions are different. The fundamental question of contract law is, "did both sides do what they promised to do?" The fundamental question of license law is, "did the licensee obey the terms that the licensor set?" In a contract, I make a promise contingent on the promise that you made to me. With a license, I waive my right to sue under certain conditions, and you choose between obeying those conditions or not using my property at all.
License law doesn't require any consideration from the licensee because it really only regulates the behavior of the licensor. I can't trap you by inviting you onto my property to come birdwatching, then turn around and have you arrested for trespassing as soon as you show up. As long as you obey the terms I set, license law prohibits me from setting the police on you.
As soon as you step outside the terms of my license, tough, you're back into 'you have no right to be here at all' territory.
Your model assumes an infinite supply of potential customers who have A) no prior information about the system, and B) no way to gain information about the system without paying Google first.
Try adding 'communication between agents' to your model.
If agents in the system have the capacity to communicate A) with each other, and B) with agents who haven't yet entered the system, the effect of information lag is greatly reduced. If a large number of agents within the system find each other saying, "I get better returns from a dead-trees mailing," they'll probably be willing to cut their losses and leave rather than waiting longer (and paying more) to gather more data. If an agent who hasn't entered the system sees that same conversation, Google will probably lose a potential customer without making any money first.
WRT the winner's curse scenario you mentioned, agents who know something about game theory will shade their bids. That is the standard solution, after all. And the amount of remediation they choose will probably correlate to the amount of 'enh, not worth it' feedback they've gathered from agents previously in the system. We also have to consider the fact that an adwords auction isn't a winner-takes-all transaction. The highest bidder gets the top slot, the next highest gets the second slot, etc. This is additionally mollified by the fact that Google doesn't charge the high bidder their actual bid, they charge "next lowest bid plus one cent." Google actively minimizes the penalty for optimism -- which is fundamental to the winner's curse -- and rewards caution among the secondary bidders. To get a true winner's curse under adwords, you'd need unwarranted optimism among all the top 8 or so bidders who make it to the first search page.
That's not to say there isn't information lag, or that there aren't agents coming into the system without any prior research. But there are limits to both, and those limits work against your 'no disincentive' argument and for my 'it'll cost Google in the long run' argument.
The focus of their business is on developing proprietary add-ons (software or manuals) to sell to the users of this free software. They ask us to regard this as legitimate, as part of our community, because some of the money is donated to free software development.
which sounds like the FSF doesn't cotton to embrace-and-extend tactics to me.
and likewise he'd not take kindly to you claiming that he's in favour of "embrace and extend".
I understand there are a lot of things Theo doesn't take kindly. That's just part of his charm.
The modified BSD license is not a copyleft license, thougn, or at least the FSF says it isn't:
If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the modified BSD license is a reasonable choice.
The FSF recognizes it as being compatible with the principles of Free Software, but the lack of copyleft keeps it from being an embrace-and-extend-proof license.
Yeah.. how silly of them to make software that matches human behavior.
Why can't we have filesystems that are character-encoding sensitive? Foo.txt{ASCII} and Foo.txt{Unicode} are clearly different at the data representation level, so why can't filesystems recognize that simple, obvious fact?
Heck, while we're at it, let's add font-sensitivity: I want my Foo.txt{Arial} to be distinct from my Foo.txt{Helvetica}. Then we can throw in attribute-sensitivity, so Foo.txt{Unicode, Garamond, bold, oblique, second 'o' red} is the truly unique identifier it was intended to be.
The difference between Open Source and Free Software is that Free Software is designed to be 'embrace and extend'-proof, while Open Source is not.
I don't mean that as a criticism of either license. Both have a legitimate place in the market. Open Source licenses like the BSD license are very good at getting technology established as a standard. Windows does or has used the BSD TCP/IP stack, if memory serves me.
The GPL exists to keep companies from doing what Microsoft did to Kerberos: taking an established technology, bolting on a few proprietary extensions, pushing the new product into the market until it gets a foothold, then making the proprietary extensions 'necessary' to interact with other popular software.
We need both tools. TCP/IP would never have become the default standard if it had been released under the GPL. Meanwhile, Free Software gives the F/OSS community a way to fence its established technologies off from corporate encroachment, thus guaranteeing the continued openness of that technology.
Bottom line: OS X was built using technology from FreeBSD. It could never have been built on Linux.. not for technological reasons, but for licensing reasons.
That objection can be solved if you add the concept of 'noise' to Google's reported numbers, and I'd say most people already do that.. at least to some degree.
I don't think many people expect every adwords click to result in a sale for the advertiser. Instead, people just check to see whether there's a correlation between 'more adwords clicks' and 'more sales'. If 100 adwords clicks produce 30 additional sales, you can say that the adwords are 30% effective. Then it's up to you to decide whether those 30 additional sales are worth the cost of those 100 clicks. If so, you can write 70% of their adwords fee off as a cost of doing business. If not, you can close your adwords account, or lower the amount you're willing to pay per click.
If Google was padding its numbers, people would see lower return rates from their adwords accounts. Those people would then be less willing to pay for the service. They wouldn't expand their accounts to cover other words.
In other words, there's already a feedback mechanism that punishes Google for any loss of efficiency in its adwords program, and rewards Google for providing the best results it can.
Slashdot Mirror
You can make a pretty good prediction of where the rock will land because projectile motion is a linear system (small changes in the initial conditions produce small changes in the final result) and the disturbances impose very small forces on the rock relative to its general motion.
If you want a challenge that's comparable to predicting the weather, try to guess where your rock will actually stop after it finishes bouncing and rolling. Yeah, you can make a good guess about the initial point of impact, but then you have to try and predict its attitude at the moment of impact and how it will interact with the ground (the flat surface will skid and bounce, the sharp point will dig in and cause the rock to tumble), and each new impact induces forces that are large relative to the rock's current linear and angular momentum.
Weather prediction.. especially long-term weather prediction.. is a model-based nonlinear science. Model-based science is iffy anyway, because models are so easy to come by. As one aeronautical engineer put it, "the problem with models is that they only let you study what you already know." Long-tem predictions of nonlinear systems are also questionable, because over time, nonlinear systems amplify small errors in the initial values or assumptions to a point where they completely overwhelm the accurate predictions. To put it another way, the farther ahead you try to predict a nonlinear system, the greater the probability that your result will end up being completely bogus.
Added to that is the fact that climatologists know they don't understand all the rules of the system yet. The elephant in the dining room is the cloud system, which is vastly nonlinear and has a huge impact on both short-term and long-term weather trends. Clouds trap heat, move water, carry energy, and change the planetary albedo, and we have almost nothing in terms of a general model to explain how they work. Trying to make long-term weather predictions without taking the clouds into account is like the old joke where the physicist says, "first, ve approximate ze cow as a perfect sphere."
Yeah.. so?
In science, a person's agenda is irrelevant. The researchers can be pedophile Nazi cannibals for all the universe cares, but if their theory correlates with observable fact, their theory is worth taking seriously. Period.
There's way too much public discussion that treats science like some kind of popularity contest.. 'truth' is what the cool people say, and refutation from the uncool camp can be discarded simply by sneering at its source. People who engage in that kind of bullshit surrender their right to call their opinions 'scientific'.
The AS article discusses the history of the thermohaline conveyor and the scientific discussion surrounding it, provides a general description of the model the author used to test the idea that the conveyor has a primary influence on keeping western Europe warm, and even discusses some of the contradictions inherent in the media-hyped notion of a globally-warmed ice age (the prevailing model of global warming says the difference in temperatures between the poles and the equator will get smaller. Shutting off the conveyor will theoretically make the northern latitudes colder, thus *increasing* the temperature gradient. You can't have it both ways at once). Then the author discusses an alternate mechanism for European warming (topgraphically forced tropospheric deviations) that's perfectly consistent with orthodox climatological science.
If the author got his facts wrong, point to the errors. If he failed to include relevant information, show it. If you can find holes in the author's reasoning, tell us what they are. If you have a different climate model that you think carries more correlation to observed reality, let's see it. That's scientific discussion.
But if all you can do is piss on the fundamental principles of science because this article offends your preconcieved notions, please do science a favor and shut the fuck up.
Taking the risk that you aren't joking, you have the cause and effect reversed. First the orbit changed, then the animals died off.
The earth's orbit *does* change over time. Small gravitational influences from the other planets in the solar system add up over time, moving us a little closer to, or farther from, the sun. To make things even more fun, we can't predict exactly what will happen or when, since it's mathematically impossible to predict the paths of three or more orbiting bodies, except in a few special cases.
When you can connect to you home desktop with 300 gigs of MP3's wirelessly via your cell phone.....why even bother carrying around an extra device.
Because under the current encoding schemes, digital music consumes about 1-2 megabytes per minute. To a very loose approximation, that's about 250 K/s or 250 kbps. The current data transfer rates for cell phone networks are roughly the same as dialup: 50-100 kbps. At those rates, it would take longer to load the song than play it. 3G broadband runs around 4-700 kbps, which is good enough to actually play the song in real time with a less-than-perfect signal.
Because the phone companies charge a premium for 3G, and a 1000-minute plan will buy you 1 hour of music a day for half a month (17 days).. not counting, y'know, phone calls.
Because wireless communication eats power, and 75 megs of data transfer an hour eats lots of power. People don't like carrying a battery the size of a brick everywhere they go.
Because people will get annoyed when the wireless network drops their connection halfway through a song, or when they can't contact the 300 gig server at home at all because they're outside their coverage area. They're also likely to get annoyed when the phone shuts off the music every time they get a call.
By contrast, my iPod carries 30 gigs of music and can play music all day, every day, for free.
Two reasons:
First, for all the speculation, the Zune is still an unreleased product due to hit the market Real Soon Now. No Zune in the wild has actually wrapped DRM around a CCL'd file contrary to its license, yet.
Second, it isn't Microsoft's fault for building a DRM'd channel for sharing music any more than it's Gnutella or Bittorrent's fault for building a non-DRM'd channel for sharing music. The guilt for applying DRM to a CCL'd file by sharing it over Zune wifi will fall on the shoulders of the consumer who actually shares the file, just like it falls on the shoulders of the person who actually strips the DRM off a file and posts it to a P2P network. The legal arguments and precedents apply equally well either way.
Taking a large leap of faith and assuming that both the Zune and its wifi-sharing thing become massively popular, this will simply create a climate where anti-DRM-licensed music has a disadvantage in terms of distribution.. also assuming that the people who licensed the files choose to prosecute people who share the files in a way that violates the license. Otherwise people will ignore the whole thing and the applied DRM, while technically illegal, will be a nonissue.
Actually, special relativity covers this pretty well.
The idea that the internal forces will balance is Newtonian. If we have a ping-pong ball bouncing back and forth in a horn-shaped chamber, we have two cases to consider: when the ball is close to the center, it bounces from one flat end to the other and the force of each bounce balances the force of the bounce at the opposite end. When the ball is close to the edge, it bounces from the large flat side and then hits a wall. The force of the impact with the wall transfers some energy from the ball to the chamber, and slows the ball down slightly. The energy transferred to the chamber has one component perpendicular to the chamber's axis, and that component moves the chamber sideways a little bit. There's also a component that's parallel to the chamber's axis, and that component precisely matches the loss of force when the ball hits the small flat side moving at a slightly lower speed.
Problem is, we're talking about photons. They don't have the option of slowing down.
When a photon loses energy by reflecting off the chamber wall, it can't lose speed, so it loses mass. The energy gained by the chamber wall is translated into heat, not linear motion. When the photon gets to the small end of the chamber, it's still moving at the speed of light, but has less effective mass, so it imparts less energy to the chamber with that reflection.
The energy is conserved properly, even if the traditional notion of Newtonian momentum isn't, and it's well established that relativistic mechanics don't preserve the Newtonian concepts of mass or momentum.
It's also worth noting that this isn't a perpetual motion machine. As soon as the whole system moves, the photons inside the chamber lose their energy and have to be re-excited.
As an aside, the team that writes the flight-control software for the space shuttle -- who arguably have some of the highest quality standards in the world of software -- demand an average of about one bug per thousand lines of code at the unit-test stage. First, most bugs show up at the boundary where two different subsystems interact, and it's more cost-effective to find those during the integration stage than at unit-test time.
More importantly, though, if they hit a patch where they consistently fail to find any bugs, they audit their testing procedures to make sure they aren't missing anything.
And just as a piece of related trivia, in _Applied Cryptography_, Bruce Schneier runs the numbers on the minimum amount of energy necessary to represent one bit of information at the quantum level, divides that into the current best estimate for the total energy of the universe, and shows that there isn't enough energy in the universe to completely clock (i.e.: start at zero and increment by one until you overflow and drop back to zero again) a 512-bit counter.
(BTW - multiple exponentiation multiplies the exponents: 2^8^1500 == 2^(8 * 1500) == 2^12,000)
Enh.. it's not that bad. I've been giving you the harsh view because you were working with a couple of common-but-incorrect ideas about law: that being able to make a legally-defensible argument means that you'll automatically win, and with that being the case, that lawyers are basically unnecessary.
/' if you really want to, and doesn't show much sympathy if you don't RTFM before you do. That's both a blessing and a curse, depending on how you want to look at it, but the general consensus is that it's better than the alternatives.
The thing you have to remember is that a court's decision is the final, sudden-death resolution of a disagreement that can't be settled any other way. People always have the option to negotiate an agreement between themselves before going to court. Heck, they can even reach an agreement halfway through a trial if the rulings put one party or the other at a serious disadvantage. Nobody who understands the law says, "see you in court" as a first option.
I've also skipped things that balance the scale, like pro-bono legal representation. A lot of people sued by the RIAA are being represented for free, because the lawyers themselves don't want to see the RIAA build a legally-admissible track record of victories. Then there are the judges.. they play a very important role in the law, because they balance what's written down in the rules against what's actually more-or-less fair at the moment. If a big corporation tried to bury a single pro-bono lawyer in documents, that lawyer could say, "your honor, these guys are making things unnecessarily difficult. Would you please order them to reduce this mountain of crap to a list of bullet-points?" and depending on the situation, the judge might well do so. In extreme cases, the judge will even bend the rules or give the little guy procedural advice in order to level the playing field.
The adversarial-presentation-of-evidence policy also puts some limits on the value of sheer manpower. Not even a thousand lawyers can put a provably-untrue statement into the record if the other side is paying attention. That's another reason for using a lawyer: your opponent might be tempted to play fast and loose with his arguments if he knows you don't have the experience to double-check anything, but he'll be a lot more careful if he knows you have someone experienced (and capable of calling for sanctions) checking the books.
You also have to remember that lawyers (and litigation) cost money on both sides. The SCO -v- IBM trial shows an aggressive legal team pulling every trick in the book, but it also shows SCO spending money like mad.
In some ways, the law is like unix: it gives you the power to 'sudo rm -rf
The law has been around a long time, and a lot of very intelligent people have put a lot of effort into spotting the ways it can be abused and trying to find good ways of patching those holes. Yeah, there are some rough spots, but when you see clearly eggregious problems, it's usually because someone tried to do something pretty darned stupid in the first place.
That's where we the 'wiggle room' thing comes into play.
Yes it's clearly legal to copy a work for archival purposes. OTOH, it's clearly illegal to use a digital master to make and distribute unlimted copies of the work. Trouble is, once the stuff's in a computer, the 'archival copy' and the 'digital master' are identical.
When a single thing can be used in two different ways, judges basically say, "I don't care what you call it, I want to know what you do with it." So if you want your "clearly legal fair-use copy" definition to stand up in court, you'll have to show that you -- and the public in general, since you're not the only person who can get a copy of these files -- behave in a way that's completely consistent with fair use, and clearly not consistent with illegal copying of a digital master.
Good luck with that.. you'll have about a billion pages worth of Napster/BitTorrent/Gnutella/Darknet traffic to explain away plausibly. And much of that traffic has already been ruled to be illegal copying, so you'll basically have to present an argument for why the previous courts were wrong.
Fact is, people do copy files illegally, so now we have to argue the question, "how much money are the record companies obligated to lose just to protect your right to make perfectly legal fair-use archival copies in this specific way?" The flip side of that question is, "how much of fair use does the public have to give up just to protect a record company's bottom line?"
These are not simple questions.
I've pretty much dealt with that above, but the basically, "no." It's hard to find an issue where only one body of law comes into play. Most cases involve one party saying, "I define the situation as X, and according to this body of law and precedence, I clearly win," while the other party says, "I define the situation as Y, and according to this body of law and precedence, I clearly win."
Time.
If the other guy dumps a hundred thousand documents on the table, your lawyer has to read and respond to each and every one of them. And while he's doing that, your opponent will have twenty lawyers building the next pile of stuff he'll have to respond to. Then there's expert testimony. If your opponent hires an expert (or ten) to define certain facts in a way that supports his case, you have to hire experts to refute those definitions. Then there's third-party discovery. If your opponent interviews a thousand ISPs and cherry-picks data to support his side of the case, you have to interview the same ISPs just to prove that your opponent did cherry-pick the data, and then you have to collect and present your own data.
And that's just the straightforward, indisputably ethical stuff. Dig through the Groklaw archives to see how an aggresive legal firm can game the system and make their opponent pay through the nose without even having demonstrated clear standing to bring the case to court in the first place.
Unfortunately, very few legal situations are ever 'quite clear'.
The law represents an attempt to find a balance between many different interests, and it can't do that with simple pass/fail, you-win/you-lose rules. There's a lot of wiggle room, and deciding a case is less a matter of saying, "this rule hands you the victory" and more one of deciding whether the scale tips more one way or the other.
As for why you need a lawyer, there are several good reasons. First, a lawyer knows what kinds of things you need to bring into court, and knows how to handle all the paperwork to bring them before the court properly. Second, a lawyer knows what kinds of arguments and evidence will tip the scale more your direction.. think of it as the difference between getting driving directions from a map, and getting directions from someone who knows where all the road construction is and how busy the roads are at any given time of day. Third, if you're going to court over an issue that's fairly common.. say you want to object to a ticket from a speed camera.. a lawyer might already have expert testimony on record in that district. She can just say, "I want to use this one again," where you'd have to hire the expert to write another report and go through all the paperwork of filing it for yourself.
Most important though, a lawyer knows how to keep your opponent's lawyer from gaining an unfair advantage.
See, the US legal system doesn't deal in 'truth'. It deals in evidence. And it accepts as 'evidence' any statement that both parties are willing to allow into court. In other words, your opponent can say, "the defendant agrees that he has no case" and if you let that statement go into the record, you lose. As far as the court is concerned, the fact that you allowed the statement to go into the record means you do agree with it. You have the option to object to it, tack qualifications onto it, or otherwise get your side of the story written into the record, but it's your job to do that, and no one else's.
A lawyer knows how to keep an eye on what's officially on record, and is ethically, professionally, and legally required to keep your from being bushwhacked that way.
Even so, a court battle pertty much boils down to "who can build the biggest pile of evidence that the other side can't throw out?" If your opponent has deep enough pockets, he can bankrupt you simply by piling up heaps of stuff or you to shoot down. He may not 'win' in a legal sense, but he can ruin your business and your life in the process of 'losing'.
Feed it to bacteria and let them generate new hydrocarbons.
Thermodynamically, we have to lose energy somewhere. It will always take more energy to go around the carbon -> hydrocarbon -> carbon + hydrogen -> water loop than we can capture from the hydrogen -> water phase. Obviously you know that, I'm just stating it for the sake of framing the discussion.
Getting back up the carbon -> hydrocarbon curve will be an enthalpic process, but bacteria can do it at a fairly low industrial cost. The bugs will burn far more energy producing the hydrocarbons than we can extract from the hydrogen -> water phase, but we humans don't have to care. We can just set big tanks of sludge out in the sunlight, and let the bugs do the rest.
Ideally, we'd be able to keep the carbon in a closed loop: bacterially hydrogenating it, dehydrogenating it during the energy production process, then starting all over again.
The big problem would be ramping up such a system industrially. The tanks of sludge in question would have to be huge, and I have no idea what dollar-cost petrochemical hydrocarbons would have to reach before it would be economically sensible to try building such a thing. Things would get better over time -- the industrial processes would get more efficient and people would breed strains of bugs that generate hydrocarbons faster and more efficiently -- but the initial payoff would be pretty low, and the costs would be high.
Sweatshop: (n) A working place where the conditions are shitty, the pay is shit, and, unless you want to eat shit, you have no choice but to work there.
Try pulling your head out of your ass long enough to read _The Jungle_ by Upton Sinclair. Then follow it up with _The Bitter Cry of the Children_ by John Spargo, and _How the Other Half Lives_ by Jacob Riis. The defining characteristic of a sweat-shop is its lack of even the most basic health and safety considerations. We're talking 'arms ripped off in machines with no guard rails' and 'dropping over dead from heatstroke' conditions.
Those conditions were normal here in the US a century ago. If you can show me documentation of conditions at the FoxConn factory that are even vaguely like the ones New York garment and factory workers tolerated in the 1900s, then I'll grant you the use of the word 'sweatshop'. If you can't, I'll call you a pompous little jackoff throwing loaded words around to hide the fact that he doesn't have an argument based on actual facts.
The fact is that, regardless of local median wage, the people working at this factory are picking up marketable skills. If they do decide to go look for another job, their time at FoxConn will A) allow them to acquire enough money to move to a different job market, and B) give them a much better chance of finding a job after they leave.
To understand that statement, you have to stop thinking in first-world terms, where we devote significant resources to instilling basic marketable skills into anyone who makes in through 8th grade. In third-world countries, poor people survive by picking recyclable materials out of garbage dumps.. and we're not talking about EPA-regulated American landfills. We're talking about miles of mixed household, medical, and industrial waste, complete with toxic fumes and sludge. 80-90% of waste-pickers are women, and most are the primary source of income for their family. Most have husbands who are alcoholics or drug addicts. Most support themselves, their husbands (and his habits), their children, and one or more extended family members. They have no marketable skills, they gain no marketable skills from picking garbage, and they can't stop picking garbage long enough to acquire marketable skills and still feed their families. To a person in that situation, the prospect of working for a company that provides housing, food, medical and recreational facilities, a climate-controlled non-toxic working environment, and gives them skills that will give them a fighting chance to maintain that standard of living even if they decide to leave the company.. well, that's a definite step up.
It's also a fact that the only documented 'abuse' in this whole story was a FoxConn policy that allowed workers to sign up for more than 60 hours of work per week, rather than capping their overtime at a maximum of 60 hrs/week. That's not "60 hours mandatory," it's, "not stopping people after they've volunteered to put in another 20." And that policy has now been changed, at least in the 15% of the plant that serves Apple. A related fact is that the biggest complaint among workers was that there wasn't enough overtime during the off-peak seasons.
Okay skipping the whole thing about the fact that you have to separate the hydrogen and oxygen before burning them
Minor technical point, but it is possible to liberate hydrogen from compounds with lower disassociation energies, like hydrocarbons. It takes about 460 kJ/mol to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but only about 415 kJ/mol to split methane into hydrogen and carbon. Running (CH4 + O2) -> (C + 2H2 + O2) -> (C + 2H2O) produces an energy yield of about 45 kJ/mol.
Water has a molar weight of 18 g, so there are about 55 moles in a liter of water. 55 * 45 == 2475 kilojoules of energy per liter of water produced. Water has a specific heat of 4.18 kJ/l-C, so the energy liberated in generating a liter of water equals about 590 liter-degrees-C.. enough to take 6 liters of water from just above ice to just below boiling.
Granted, that doesn't come anywhere close to running a house for a day, but it's a much better yield than you'd get from splitting water electrolytically and putting it back together again. Even taking the inevitable losses into account, it's possible to end up with a positive energy yield.
And while this is pure blue-sky speculation, I read an article the other day about a team of materials scientists who'd created a plastic with alternating superhydrophlic and superhydrophobic regions.. the stuff basically strains water right out of the air. Assuming someone could do the same for methane, it would be theoretically possible to pull some cow-farts out of the atmosphere and generate power while we're at it.
Context menus are useful in Windows because they provide quick(er) access via the mouse to commonly used functions.
;-)
Well, part of that is due to the habit some Windows developers have of ignoring the basic UI guideline:
the depth of a nested menu tree should be less than the mean-time-before-failure of the mouse button.
We really need to recognize the differences between the two companies.
Microsoft is a software consolidation house. They look for what's already out there and popular, and build a more or less standard version of that technology into their platform. That isn't bad. Almost every form of software does end up being dominated by one or two major implementations in the long run, and it's darn good business sense to try and own as many of those implementations as possible. That's one of the reasons Microsoft will continue to be relevant in the marketplace even if it does lose its OS-and-application-suite lock-in. It'll just shift from an 'upgrade treadmill' strategy to an 'integrated solutions' strategy, and will continue to play a significant role in the software market for years to come.
Apple, OTOH, can't make enough money on consolidation to stay afloat. It has to find (or build) new markets and cash in on the early adopters before the product becomes so well-known that consolidation houses like Microsoft can take over. In the long run, Microsoft stands a very good chance of owning a healthy chunk of the digital music market. Apple has dominance in that market now, thanks to the combination of hardware integration with the iPod and the RIAA-induced significance of its FairPlay DRM, but in the long run that will likely fade away. We'll probably see enough artists opening their work under less restrictive terms than the RIAA would like before we see the RIAA itself give up on DRM, but eventually there will be a profitable catalog of music available under terms that allow other vendors to sell music for the iPod. At that point, it will make sense for Apple to license FairPlay, and Microsoft will be able to bring its financial endurance to bear.
And by then, Apple will be going for profits in some new and completely different market that isn't valuable enough for Microsoft to try and consolidate yet.
'Copying' is a vaguely correct term for the natural flow of technology from a company that makes its money by finding the version of a new product that's good enough to create an expanding market, to a company that consolidates the good ideas already in known, profitable markets and builds something good enough to become a standard product. It definitely has some topspin to it, and there are more moderate ways to discuss the issue if you really want to be balanced. But let's get real: we're talking about advertising, here. The goal is to create a positive impression for the client's product while not saying anything outright false. And the event in question was an Apple Developer's conference. Show me a Linux conference with absolutely no MS-bashing, or a Microsoft conference that doesn't engage in its own spin (anyone remember the "Windows 95: so good the feds want to make it illegal" bumper stickers floating around Seattle about ten years ago?), and we'll talk about the denotative accuracy of the statements Apple made at WWDC.
No, the sheer mental cost of remembering how the offscreen information is organized is more than most people can handle. Either you have to memorize the positions and contents of Y layered windows on X different desktops, or you have to train yourself to follow some kind of 'this information goes on this desktop' work scheme, or you have to play 'hunt like hell' for that one window you were using five tasks ago, which has the information you want.
Those problems are intrinsic to virtual desktops. The whole point of virtual desktops is to make some (and usually most) of the user's working data invisible at any given time, and any time you make information invisible, you impose a load on the user's memory. In most cases, people switching between apps do so because they're trying to accomplish something and their minds are focused on doing that job, not on remembering how all the offscreen information is arranged. The 'what I'm doing right now' task and the 'keeping the virtual desktop organized' tasks end up competing for the user's mental resources.
It takes skill to use virtual desktops effectively and efficiently. Most casual computer users lack those skills, and for those people, the virtual desktop environment ends up being more of a nuisance than it's worth.
*chuckle*
People who use a kernel that's basically a reimplementation of Unix -- itself a dead-simple reimplementation of some core ideas from Multics -- whose GUI projects are doing their damndest to be Windows from ten years ago, and who get excited about progress in OpenOffice, which is more or less a knockoff of MS Office, have limited grounds for getting snarky about anyone else "invent[ing] it again for the first time."
The sheer novelty of an idea is only one thing you can get excited about. Quality of execution for an existing idea is another. F/OSS folks have legitimate grounds for gettng excited about progress in OpenOffice, and Mac users have legitimate grounds for getting excited about Spaces.
I appreciate your respectful and interesting response,
Thank you, in turn, for an equally polite and well-considered follow-up. You make some good points, and I think we have generally similar views of the situation, even if we approach the matter from different directions.
It's true that the sheer volume of experimentation currently underway does undercut the effects of communication among agents. OTOH, I think I'm working with a much more coarse-grained model of communication than you are. You discussed the problems of getting accurate measurements of adwords performance in specific markets: that's very true, and has a lot of value in a more or less classical economic model that assumes agents are intelligent, rational, and want the most perfect information they can get. But that model works as an asymptotic forecast of agent behavior over the long term. It doesn't do so well with respect to the short term. The classic summary of that problem is that "according to all the best classical economic models, the stock market shouldn't even exist."
I'm looking at short-term communication between agents which is usually inaccurate -- and frequently irrational -- but which does have a strong impact on the short-term behavior of agents in any given market. It's the stuff that drives pump-and-dump fraud schemes. The very fact that the words 'Google click-fraud' have made it to the mainstream media will make a lot of people leery of the adwords program, regardless of its actual performance for them in their specific market. Call it the counterbalance to the people you mentioned, who are just happy to see a positive surplus in traffic. My gut says that the people willing to try adwords on the hope that they'll see some kind of positive surplus are the same ones who'll decide not to bother if there's too much generic anti-Google zeitgeist in the air.
And while you'll get no argument from me that Google can take advantage of the current inefficiencies of communication and lack of a reliable baseline from which to measure adwords performance over the short term, I think doing so would be a phenomenally stupid move on their part.. a tactical victory that leads to strategic loss, roughly like a low initial sale price tied to a very high TCO, on the purchasing end.
In the long term, any reputation Google acquires for knowingly engaging in fraud, or even ignoring fraud that it reasonably could have spotted, will reduce the potential customer's perception of the utiilty of the adwords program. A reduction of perceived utility turns into a reduction in sale price over the long run, because price eventually does balance utility. Any profit Google skims from fraud over the short term will amortize out very badly over the long term. And in almost any business, the vast majority of the money is in the long term.
The optimum cash strategy for Google would be to skim a certain amount of extra profit from fraud while they can, but to make sure that skimming is highly deniable, and to retire any skimmable fraud pattern that looks like it might become public knowledge before it blows up in Google's face. The only trouble is, that strategy takes more work than just trying to build the best product possible.
You've got three different bodies of law all mushed together -- copyright, license law, and contract law -- and are dangerously close to joining Microsoft in declaring the GPL illegal.
Copyright law gives the rights holder the power to establish the license under which the work will be distributed. That's all. You're right that copyright law per se doesn't apply to use, only to distribution and copying. License law, OTOH, does give the rights holder the power to set restrictions upon use.
The term 'license' originally meant 'permission to enter my land'. Entering somene else's land without permission is called 'trespassing'. Now, if I give you permission to enter my land, I have every right to impose restrictions on your behavior while you're there. If I say, "no hunting," you can't come onto my land, shoot my deer, and then say, "the restriction is invalid because I never signed a contract." The default state under the law is that you have no right to be on my property, period. I waived my right to have to arrested for trespassing simply for being on my land when I gave you the 'no hunting' license, but you can't extend that license beyond the terms that I set.
Contract law is irrelevant to licensing issues, because the fundamental legal questions are different. The fundamental question of contract law is, "did both sides do what they promised to do?" The fundamental question of license law is, "did the licensee obey the terms that the licensor set?" In a contract, I make a promise contingent on the promise that you made to me. With a license, I waive my right to sue under certain conditions, and you choose between obeying those conditions or not using my property at all.
License law doesn't require any consideration from the licensee because it really only regulates the behavior of the licensor. I can't trap you by inviting you onto my property to come birdwatching, then turn around and have you arrested for trespassing as soon as you show up. As long as you obey the terms I set, license law prohibits me from setting the police on you.
As soon as you step outside the terms of my license, tough, you're back into 'you have no right to be here at all' territory.
Your model assumes an infinite supply of potential customers who have A) no prior information about the system, and B) no way to gain information about the system without paying Google first.
Try adding 'communication between agents' to your model.
If agents in the system have the capacity to communicate A) with each other, and B) with agents who haven't yet entered the system, the effect of information lag is greatly reduced. If a large number of agents within the system find each other saying, "I get better returns from a dead-trees mailing," they'll probably be willing to cut their losses and leave rather than waiting longer (and paying more) to gather more data. If an agent who hasn't entered the system sees that same conversation, Google will probably lose a potential customer without making any money first.
WRT the winner's curse scenario you mentioned, agents who know something about game theory will shade their bids. That is the standard solution, after all. And the amount of remediation they choose will probably correlate to the amount of 'enh, not worth it' feedback they've gathered from agents previously in the system. We also have to consider the fact that an adwords auction isn't a winner-takes-all transaction. The highest bidder gets the top slot, the next highest gets the second slot, etc. This is additionally mollified by the fact that Google doesn't charge the high bidder their actual bid, they charge "next lowest bid plus one cent." Google actively minimizes the penalty for optimism -- which is fundamental to the winner's curse -- and rewards caution among the secondary bidders. To get a true winner's curse under adwords, you'd need unwarranted optimism among all the top 8 or so bidders who make it to the first search page.
That's not to say there isn't information lag, or that there aren't agents coming into the system without any prior research. But there are limits to both, and those limits work against your 'no disincentive' argument and for my 'it'll cost Google in the long run' argument.
The BSD license is a recognized Free Software license
Correction on my part: The original BSD license. Check the FSF for details. And you have read the FSF discussion of the difference between 'Free Software' and 'Open Source', haven't you? Included in that text is:
which sounds like the FSF doesn't cotton to embrace-and-extend tactics to me.
and likewise he'd not take kindly to you claiming that he's in favour of "embrace and extend".
I understand there are a lot of things Theo doesn't take kindly. That's just part of his charm. The modified BSD license is not a copyleft license, thougn, or at least the FSF says it isn't:
The FSF recognizes it as being compatible with the principles of Free Software, but the lack of copyleft keeps it from being an embrace-and-extend-proof license.
Theo is a smart guy, and I'm sure he knows that.
Yeah.. how silly of them to make software that matches human behavior.
Why can't we have filesystems that are character-encoding sensitive? Foo.txt{ASCII} and Foo.txt{Unicode} are clearly different at the data representation level, so why can't filesystems recognize that simple, obvious fact?
Heck, while we're at it, let's add font-sensitivity: I want my Foo.txt{Arial} to be distinct from my Foo.txt{Helvetica}. Then we can throw in attribute-sensitivity, so Foo.txt{Unicode, Garamond, bold, oblique, second 'o' red} is the truly unique identifier it was intended to be.
The difference between Open Source and Free Software is that Free Software is designed to be 'embrace and extend'-proof, while Open Source is not.
I don't mean that as a criticism of either license. Both have a legitimate place in the market. Open Source licenses like the BSD license are very good at getting technology established as a standard. Windows does or has used the BSD TCP/IP stack, if memory serves me.
The GPL exists to keep companies from doing what Microsoft did to Kerberos: taking an established technology, bolting on a few proprietary extensions, pushing the new product into the market until it gets a foothold, then making the proprietary extensions 'necessary' to interact with other popular software.
We need both tools. TCP/IP would never have become the default standard if it had been released under the GPL. Meanwhile, Free Software gives the F/OSS community a way to fence its established technologies off from corporate encroachment, thus guaranteeing the continued openness of that technology.
Bottom line: OS X was built using technology from FreeBSD. It could never have been built on Linux.. not for technological reasons, but for licensing reasons.
That objection can be solved if you add the concept of 'noise' to Google's reported numbers, and I'd say most people already do that.. at least to some degree.
I don't think many people expect every adwords click to result in a sale for the advertiser. Instead, people just check to see whether there's a correlation between 'more adwords clicks' and 'more sales'. If 100 adwords clicks produce 30 additional sales, you can say that the adwords are 30% effective. Then it's up to you to decide whether those 30 additional sales are worth the cost of those 100 clicks. If so, you can write 70% of their adwords fee off as a cost of doing business. If not, you can close your adwords account, or lower the amount you're willing to pay per click.
If Google was padding its numbers, people would see lower return rates from their adwords accounts. Those people would then be less willing to pay for the service. They wouldn't expand their accounts to cover other words.
In other words, there's already a feedback mechanism that punishes Google for any loss of efficiency in its adwords program, and rewards Google for providing the best results it can.