It's never seemed logical to me that people who buy software should have to bear the brunt of copy protection when pirates get a superior experience without compensating the company producting it. So it's about time that Microsoft has figured out a way to degrade the experience of software pirates instead of that of legitimate users.
Are you serious? This is yet another example where the paying customer will be hindered, whereas the illegitimate users will not. A cracked version of Vista, that doesn't exhibit this degradation, will probably be on P2P networks within a week. People buying illegal copies will simply be using this pre-cracked version, and won't notice a single hiccup or headache.
Meanwhile, users who have paid for the software will have this "protection" in place. At best, this means that they don't notice any difference (except for a small loss of system resources going to these checks). In many cases, the copy restrictions will make legitimate uses (e.g. reinstallation) troublesome. At worst, the system will make mistakes, and lock out legitimate users from their system.
Not to mention of course that it'll be nice to see Windows come down in price once this takes effect.
Now you must be joking. Microsoft is in a monopoly position. Even if they manage to stop "piracy," thereby increasing their revenue... they will have no incentive to decrease prices.
This new copy protection is not a boon for legitimate users.
You're viewing it from the point of view of "if these online services have onerous terms, just don't use them!"
You're right, of course. But my cynical prediction is that most people will accept the onerous TOS, thereby validating the approach, and making such invasions of privacy accepted by the mainstream. You may say "who cares? Let those lemmings give away their privacy!"... which is fine, were it not for the fact that it will have consequences even for those of us who object and refrain from using the services. Some (perhaps overly alarmist) possible consequences are:
1. The widespread usage of such systems desensitizes people to privacy abuse, and to corporations changing rules with little to no notification. The result is that it becomes accepted common practice, and the laws (or at least the application of law) become skewed towards accepting such things. So, even those of us who resisted the loss of privacy and control are nevertheless forced to give up privacy and control.
2. Online systems that trap user data hostage become so commonplace that you cannot "survive" without using them. That is, to do your job and to interact with other people online in the ways they "expect", you have to sign up for these services whether you like it or not. Yes, you can refrain from using them, but they become so deeply insinuated in the "common practice" of business and social networking that if you don't use them, you are at a disadvantage.
So, we can either sit on the sidelines, smug with the knowledge that we are not participating directly in the erosion of privacy and digital freedom... or we can proactively oppose any such system, by educating others about the potential dangers.
I'm not advocating nanny-state interference here, just proactive education, and publicly decrying privacy-infringing services.
Competition is great for customers. Not so much for the corporations in competition.
Sure, a company in a monopoly position will charge whatever they want. And in an immediate sense, this definitely means higher profits.
But in the long term, I think competition can be good for the companies involved, too. (Not in all cases, of course, but in some sectors of the economy.) I think semiconductors is a pretty good example. Imagine if for the last 10 years we had only a single vendor of chips (Intel, AMD, IBM, whoever). This single vendor would feel very little competition, and would thus feel no pressure to innovate. The technology would advance much more slowly. The end result would actually be that people would be replacing their computers every 6-10 years instead of every 3-5 years. So, in short, they actual sell less volume, even if they keep all the volume for themselves, and can charge higher prices. (Higher prices means less volume, too.) Essentially, the frenetic "technological refresh" that we currently engage in is precisely what drives the semiconductor industry. This wouldn't exist without the constant innovation and competition.
It's natural for companies to want to always dominate, since this will always yield short-term gains. However I think companies in a vibrant, competitive sector of the economy can generate more money, overall, than if the competition didn't exist.
(Again, I fully accept that this won't always be the case. For example in established domains where there is a constant demand for a product, being a monopoly is "a license to print money," as they say.)
Another good listing of smallish software is Portable Apps. These are normal (open source) applications that have been fine-tuned to be "portable" so that you can run them off of a USB key for instance (e.g. they store settings locally).
Many of the apps were chosen because they are small and light. Others have been stripped to the minimum, so that they can fit comfortably on removable media (e.g. OpenOffice Portable is 69 MB instead of the usual 100 MB).
The PortableApps Suite is only 89MB and covers all the basics (office suite, browser, email, etc.).
If you're looking for a lightweight app to fill a particular need, it's a good place to start looking.
Indeed. Many of most our highly regarded social values/goals (freedom of speech, racial equality, etc.) are rather modern concepts. I would argue that in addition to the "moral high-ground" of such concepts, they brought with them considerable peace, progress, and prosperity (both intellectual, and even economic). The conclusion I hope people draw from this is that we must be on the lookout for new social values which will "elevate" our society.
Perhaps one of the hardest ideas to get across in the whole "intellectual property" debate is that, perhaps, there is some social value currently being ignored. Many people decry the "information wants to be free" rally as nothing more than "greedy pirates justifying their selfishness." While I will not deny that many people violate copyright law for purely selfish reasons, I again want to emphasize that there may be a deeper moral question... and that many opponents of the status quo may be deriving their opinions from that question.
I do not really think that a "no copyright" world is the right way to go... but there is a social value of "digital freedom" (or whatever you want to call it) that is not yet taken seriously, but I believe will be crucial to our advancement, as a society, in the coming years. I think we need to learn to accord fundamental respect to the pursuit of knowledge, to the free distribution of knowledge and culture. Yes, this needs to be balanced against incentives to artists and reward for contributing to society. However I believe the present climate where all ideas are "owned" is untenable and, ultimately, immoral.
Actually that's precisely the imbalance we now see in copyright law: their "rights" have been enshrined in new laws (DMCA) whereas our "rights" have not.
Previously, there was some sort of tenuous balance, though it wasn't specified by law: people could use copyrighted materials in certain ways (fair use), and companies were pretty much guaranteed that widespread infringement would be easy to deal with (since printing presses were big and expensive). In the modern age, the companies see their previous comfortable position being eroded (by copying and distribution becoming trivially easy). So they get new laws to give them back the comfort they previously had. They claim that this is their "right" and so now we have the DMCA, granting them these "rights."
The people, meanwhile, are seeing fair use eroding more every day (DRM, etc.). However, fair use has not been protected by any new laws. So companies can use technical measures to prevent fair use, and there's nothing we can (legally) do. The balance is gone.
Personally, I think the means of restoring the balance would be to repeal the DMCA and even scale back copyright law, rather than creating yet more laws.
Can you provide a reference for that? This is an honest request, because I find that quite shocking and wasn't able to find any confirmation of it.
The homepage for the Canadian National DNA Data Bank says that DNA samples are taken only from convicted criminals. The site says:
The government responded by assenting to the DNA Identification Act on December 10, 1998. This legislation allowed a DNA data bank to be created and amended the Criminal Code to provide a mechanism for a judge to order persons convicted of designated offences to provide blood, buccal or hair samples from which DNA profiles will be derived.
(emphasis added)
Moreover, this page discusses debate (in 2005) about whether or not a DNA database could help with missing persons investigations. The discussion doesn't mention using an already-existing DNA database of all citizens (or all citizens born since 1994) but instead seems to discuss the creation of a new database. In the discussion about whether such a database should be created, they say:
The need for strict guidelines, set forth in legislation, to govern the DNA MPI. Respondents suggested that the guidelines that govern the NDDB can be used as a model, with special consideration given to the issue of consent from family members for collection, use, retention and removal.
In short, this sounds like a proposal for a voluntary system where loved ones of a missing person could donate DNA samples to help locate the person or identify their remains. It makes no mention of an existing effort to retain DNA on all newborns since 1994.
Anyone have any further information on this subject?
(Anecdotally, I'm not aware of any such DNA testing on any children recently born in Canada--e.g. my nephew.)
Michael Crichton calls this the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect"--people tend to continue to trust mainstream media even though they consider mainstream reporting on any subject they are knowledgeable about to be imprecise or outright erroneous.
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved.... You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.... then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read....
I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.... But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't.
Though this is a rather cynical interpretation of mainstream media, I've found the same thing. On any subject I consider myself knowledgeable, I have found mainstream media's reporting to be very lacking. As a result, I've given up trying to get useful information from those sources. Unfortunately, if you want to gain even a superficial understanding of a subject, you have to do some basic independent research, reading from different sources, engaging an expert in conversation, and so on.
Apparently these systems send reports about internet surfing habits to other members of the community. The idea is to self-censor by willfully allowing another "accountability partner" to see what sites you're viewing. This self-imposed monitoring means that you will not intentionally view "unacceptable" content.
Having (briefly) looked over the MS patent, it seems only superficially different from what already exists: members of a self-censoring community flag content, and these ratings are used to block members of the community from access to the unacceptable content.
I need to correct myself (again). The article PDF is available for free download, but if you go to the article page and click on the "Request permission" link, you're brought to a new page where you can request permission to, for instance, print out copies for use in class. The form then tells you how much you have to pay them for those permissions.
The issue, of course, is that this explicitly violates the creative commons (noncommercial) license that he published under (and which the journal evidently agreed to, in order to be able to post his paper at all). The journal is thus illegally charging others for permissions that are free.
It still looks like a honest mistake. The structure of the website is such that a standard "permissions system" is being applied to a wide range of content for various journals. They seem to be mistakenly applying this system even to the open-access journals in the collection.
Even though this is probably just an honest mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. They are presently breaking the law and very much going against the spirit of the agreement that he entered into with them when he published his paper.
Your tax dollars do not pay for vetting of the paper. Vetting the paper by peers is what still makes this a valuable service.
This argument comes up every time there is an open-access debate. So allow me to address it, again.
The authors write the papers, and do not receive any pay from the journal for that. The journal editors then forward the paper to reviewers. The reviewers are volunteers, not paid by the journal. Then the editors forward the paper (if accepted) to a typesetter, and it is published.
The authors and the reviewers are academics, who basically give their time to the journals. Their salaries come from government grants, from university funds (which come from tuition), and to some extent from corporate collaborations.
The salaries of the editors and typesetters are paid by the journal subscription charges. The subscriptions come primarily from academic libraries in universities or government research institutes. (Which are, again, funded by government grants and university funds.)
So, a very large percent of the money flowing into the journal comes from public funds (taxes). Significantly, the peer reviewers are volunteers, with their actual salaries coming largely from public funds. In a very real sense, our tax dollars are indeed paying for vetting the paper. The "valuable service" of which you speak is not performed by the journal, but by the academics (who do not benefit in any way from the toll-access that the journals impose).
Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand.
True. Except in this case, the author is paying an open-access surcharge. In the blog post he says: "After all, the author has paid for this". The purpose of the surcharge is to help the journal cover distribution costs, thereby guaranteeing that everyone can read the article. If the journal accepts that publication fee, but then charges readers anyway, isn't that fraud?
Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it
He did use such a condition. He used a creative commons license with a non-commercial clause, so it's illegal for the publisher to charge people for distribution. Again from his post, he says: "The journal is therefore SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)"
If publishers are really contributing nothing... stop publishing through them!
The controversy here is precisely that he decided to publish in an open access journal. In fact, you can read about their open access policy here, which says: "From 1st January 2005, all articles published in NAR are freely available online immediately upon publication. This means that it is no longer necessary to hold a subscription in order to read current NAR content online."
After paying his >$2000 publication charge, the journal turned around and tried to charge others for access. As he points out, this could have been an innocent mistake on their part. But, it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed.
Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.
I don't know if the word "bigoted" is warranted, but I agree that we scientists need to push for open access. Which is what he did, by publishing in an open-access journal.
One of the main limitations to ground-based optical telescopes (and one of the reasons that Hubble gets such amazing images) is that the atmosphere generates considerable distortion. Random fluctuations in the atmosphere cause images to be blurry (and cause stars to twinkle, of course). The technique they present appears to be taking images at very high-speed. They developed an algorithm that looks through the images, and identifies the ones that happen to not-blurry (hence "lucky"). By combining all the least blurry images (taken when the atmosphere just happened to be not introducing distortion), they can obtain clear images using ground-based telescopes (which are bigger than Hubble, obviously). I imagine the algorithm they've implemented tries to use sub-sections of images that are clear, to get as much data as possible.
Overall, a fairly clever technique. I wonder how this compares to adaptive optics, which is another solution to this problem. In adaptive optics, a guide laser beam is used to illuminate the atmosphere above the telescope. The measured distortion of the laser beam is used to distort the imaging mirror in the telescope (usually the mirror is segmented into a bunch of small independent sub-mirrors). The end result is that adaptive optics can essentially counter-act the atmospheric distortion, delivering crisp images from ground telescopes.
I would guess that adaptive optics produces better images (partly because it "keeps" all incident light, by refocusing it properly, rather than letting a large percentage of image acquisitions be "blurry" and eventually thrown away), but adaptive optics are no doubt expensive. The technique presented in TFA seems simple enough that it would be added to just about any telescope, increasing image quality at a sacrifice in acquisition time.
Your analysis of Microsoft's actions can be summarized as "never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained through incompetence."
Fair enough. None of us can know the exact motivations for why they pushed out a faulty standard. However, what we can do is predict Microsoft's future behavior in this case, by using their past actions as a guideline. Without being overly cynical, allow me to predict that Microsoft will not rectify the deficiencies in their standard. The reason is simple: it is not really in their best interest to do so, and it's easier to try to game the political system than to actually address technical issues.
Also, though I agree that "fail early, fail often" is indeed sometimes best in software development, I don't agree that this can be extended to standards. The purpose of a standard is to have something robust that everyone can agree on. Ideally it should be something that has already undergone some amount of "field testing" and proven itself to be up to the task. In the arena of software this usually means that multiple independent implementations are already available, proving that the standard achieves what it aims to achieve.
Pushing out a deficient standard for review by standards bodies is actually quite inefficient and frankly is wasting the time of the engineers and reviewers who must look over the documentation.
Indeed. The line-edge-roughness is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as the lithography industry searches for what to use for next-generation patterning technology. Based on the talks I've been to (I do research in a related field), the large efforts that were put into developing "extreme-ultraviolet lithography" (EUV), which would use 13.5 nm illumination, are not working out. The technology is not ready (e.g. they still don't have a light-source operating at that wavelength that generates enough light...) and is very much more expensive than anything we're using today. Many in the research end are now thinking that we cannot depend upon EUV to fill the future roadmap nodes.
I agree that there are going to have to be some big changes. Some sort of disruptive technology is going to be needed. One promising area is the rather simple concept of "nanoimprint lithography": where instead of using light to shine through a mask and pattern a polymer resist (which is then used to etch patterns into the silicon), you physically press a single (reusable) high-fidelity (high-cost) mask into a polymer, at a temperature where the polymer is liquid-like. The patterned polymer resist can then be used to etch Silicon in the usual way.
This physical embossing has been shown to generate pattern fidelity way beyond what you would naively expect: sub 30-nm feature accuracy has been demonstrated. Nanoimprint is a comparatively simple and cheap methodology. When combined with the other recent advances in lithography infrastructure (like high-precision registry alignment systems), it seems quite plausible that nanoimprint will be able to deliver the features required for next-generation chips. Of course, many details need to be worked out, but it's a very promising, and rather disruptive, new technology (and has been added to the ITRS roadmap).
The actual scientific paper can be found here (subscription required). This is a very neat idea, similar to buckling-induced experiments where similar nano-patterns can be produced quickly and easily in polymeric materials. The micrographs in the paper show remarkably clean and consistent structures, with well-defined periodicity and cross-section. From a scientific point alone, it's quite remarkable to see how one can harness a usually random process (fracture) to generate well-defined nanostructures.
That having been said, this technique suffers from a few limitations. Firstly, it will be difficult to scale this down to arbitrarily small features: polymer film stability becomes increasingly difficult as the film thickness is decreased, so this technique is unlikely to scale cleanly below the 60 nm they've already demonstrated. Also, this technique generates a large-area pattern, but it doesn't appear possible to control the registry of this pattern. So, this could perhaps be used as the first step in a mult-step chip patterning, but if you can't align subsequent patterns, it becomes useless for generating complex multi-layered structures for chips. (I can imagine ways to overcome this, but it wouldn't be easy.)
As such, I really don't think this is going to "revolutionize microchip patterning" as the headline implies. I don't think this will ever be used to generate smaller and smaller chips: the current challenges in the industry for next-generation processes are beyond what this technique can do. (Besides which, it doesn't integrate particularly well into the current photo-lithography infrastructures).
However, as a lower-cost alternative for fabricating nanostructures in the micron to 100 nm size regime, I could see this being useful. It's an easy way to create a large-area array of remarkably consistent patterns. It could be used to create optical gratings, or as a template for assembly of proteins (for diagnostics, etc.), or templates for magnetic domains (in hard-drives, etc.) and many other fields.
Neither Google nor Microsoft have much of a stake in content creation.
Google's entire business is based upon fair use, so they have a stake in defending "reasonable" copying (fair use, indexing, etc.). Microsoft, however, have a business model that relies on people paying for copies of their copyrighted software. For instance, they make money when restrictions force a person to buy multiple copies of software. (E.g. lost your backup copy, it's illegal to download a copy off the net even if you already bought a real copy, so you have to buy another copy...)
Moreover, with Microsoft in the video game market (both on PCs and via the XBox), they are very much implicated in the content-creation game. Microsoft also has a history of helping the media companies achieve their aims, such as agreeing to a per-unit fee on the Zune or implementing DRM in Vista. If Microsoft was actually serious about defending fair use, their operating system would make fair use easy instead of making it onerous.
The more I think about it, the more surprising this move on Microsoft's part becomes. I guess it just comes down to Microsoft being a company so large (and poorly guided?) that different divisions can have wildly different priorities. Some parts of Microsoft would also love for you to pay a fee everytime copyrighted content is transmitted, viewed or discussed. Other parts of Microsoft only have value so long as fair use is protected.
In any case, I expect their support of fair use to be one of convenience, and hence tenuous at best. Google, on the other hand, are a valuable example of fair use being innovative and driving the economy.
because the cost of movie production involves orders of magnitude more people and money that of an album?
This is probably obvious to most of us, but it bears repeating:
The fact that a CD and a DVD cost the same amount, even though the production costs are orders-of-magnitude different, means that:
(1) A CD album sells far fewer copies than a DVD of a movie does. Thus, the price needs to be higher to recoup costs; or
(2) The price we pay is not really correlated to the production cost. In particular, the claims that the cost of a CD is required to pay all the people involved in the production of the work is greatly exaggerated.
We all know that a merchant feels no particular desire to sell something at a lower cost if people are buying it at a higher cost. In that sense, the cost of goods is never correlated to the production cost, but only based upon the price the market is willing to bear.
On the other hand, in any sector of the economy where there is competition the price of a good on the free market will be driven down closer to the production cost, because one company will always be willing to undercut another company, right up until the point where they can no longer pay for production (and staff, and reasonable return-on-investment, etc.). However, where there is no competition, the price can be inflated arbitrarily high above the production cost.
Again, it's pretty obvious, but I'll say it anyways: The high price of CDs and DVDs is because the market is dominated by a monopoly, devoid of competition.
It's part of the reason behind the tarifs we pay on storage media (as much as $25 on an iPod, for example).
Actually the levy on blank media stands (though it was recently reduced), but the levy on iPods was challenged and overturned. Apple has a page explaining that the levy was overturned and how to request a refund if you paid it.
I have a hard time with the concept of creating something, keeping a copyright in force, and then signing the copyright away for no benefit to myself
No benefit to yourself? If you're putting code under the GPL, it's usually because you believe in the principles of the GPL (keeping code open source, encouraging freedom, etc.). In such a case, the benefit of signing copyright over to the FSF is that they will take care of enforcement on your behalf.
If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
If you want your code to be public domain, then you would release it to the public domain in the first place (or use a BSD license). Using the GPL is not a substitute for public domain: it is a license which guarantees certain things, namely it guarantees that the code will remain open and shareable ("free"). If you don't care about code remaining open and shareable, then don't license it under GPL. If you do care about it being open and shareable, then license it under GPL. If you further don't want to deal with the hassles of protecting said license, sign over the copyright to the FSF, who have much experience in such matters.
This is the root of my problem with GNU in general: why show everybody how you achieved and developed a certain technological capability, without letting people actually use that method?... I think it's just a bit petty to show the code but not authorize its use.
You are basically saying that you prefer BSD to GPL. That's fine. (So, go ahead and license your code that way.) However, understand that the purpose of the GPL is to encourage all code to be "free," where free means: open source, shareable, and guaranteed to remain so.
You appear not to care about the "guaranteed to remain so" part. That's fine. But understand that many among us find closing the source of code that was freely distributed to be rather unfriendly... and we're using copyright law as a tool to help guarantee that the code remains free. This guarantee helps encourage more people to create and to release (because many people would not release their code if they knew that others would commercialize/extend it without giving back). That is, copyright law is achieving, in this case, its stated goal: to encourage the production and dissemination of content.
That, in my mind, is the brilliance of the GPL: it co-opts copyright law, uses it in an unconventional way, and thereby achieves the fundamental purpose of copyright law: to give an incentive for creation and free distribution of creative works.
At a minimum, document everything and send a report to the GPL-violations homepage (in particular, refer to contact info). That website tracks GPL violations and is in contact with the FSF. They will probably pass the information along to those whose copyright is being infringed, so that they can take direct action.
The normal course of action is that the authors of the GPL code will send friendly "please comply with the license" messages. Usually the infringing party will comply with the GPL before threat of lawsuits are mentioned.
It's definitely unfortunate that consistent policing of proprietary vendors is necessary (they, of all people, should know better!)... but ultimately I think most projects can be made to comply with the GPL without too much trouble, once they are uncovered.
So, in short, document your findings and notify the appropriate people!
That's really too bad, because obviously important tech decisions should not be made based on the product name. If the product does the job, then that's what should matters. Besides, many software names sound goofy until you get used to them--I'm sure some people thought "Dreamweaver" was a rather ambiguous and strange-sounding name, but once it attains mindshare, the name gains the appropriate recognition. Same goes for "Powerpoint," "Photoshop," "Apache," and so on.
Besides, as others have pointed out, the discussion should not have gotten to "Feisty Fawn" in any case. That would be like discounting Windows Vista because "Longhorn" sounds silly. "Longhorn" was a pre-release code-name, with the final release called "Windows Vista." Similarly, "Feisty Fawn" is a pre-release code-name, with the final release called "Ubuntu 7.04."
I don't want to insult your coworkers, but as far as I'm concerned, allowing jokes about a product name to cloud one's technical judgment is not at all professional. And I really don't think the solution is to refrain from using pre-release code-names (which are helpful to the programmers)... because people making unprofessional judgments will just focus their baseless ridicule on something else (icons, artwork, color scheme, website, forums, personalities of people involved, etc.).
Sure, publicly-funded research builds on privately-funded research, and vice versa. Sure, labs will sometimes receive a mixture of funding, receiving university funds (which derive from tuition), government funds (which derive from taxes), and corporate money (which derive from economic activity). But, you're mixing up the "corporate funding" with "corporate publishers." The two groups are totally distinct.
The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!
Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*
The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.
(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)
Journals provide peer review. This is not paid for by govt. grant money.
Actually a substantial amount of that peer review is funded by government grants. The reviewers are not paid. They are volunteers, with their salaries coming from the usual sources. In most countries university professors (and obviously employees of government-funded research institutes) get most of their research funds from government grants. (Additional funding may come from the university or from corporate collaborators.)
The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways?
Do you really want to go to a govt. database with tons of unreviewed research and try to figure out what is good and what is bs?
You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.
In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.
In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.
In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, users who have paid for the software will have this "protection" in place. At best, this means that they don't notice any difference (except for a small loss of system resources going to these checks). In many cases, the copy restrictions will make legitimate uses (e.g. reinstallation) troublesome. At worst, the system will make mistakes, and lock out legitimate users from their system. Now you must be joking. Microsoft is in a monopoly position. Even if they manage to stop "piracy," thereby increasing their revenue... they will have no incentive to decrease prices.
This new copy protection is not a boon for legitimate users.
You're viewing it from the point of view of "if these online services have onerous terms, just don't use them!" You're right, of course. But my cynical prediction is that most people will accept the onerous TOS, thereby validating the approach, and making such invasions of privacy accepted by the mainstream. You may say "who cares? Let those lemmings give away their privacy!" ... which is fine, were it not for the fact that it will have consequences even for those of us who object and refrain from using the services. Some (perhaps overly alarmist) possible consequences are:
1. The widespread usage of such systems desensitizes people to privacy abuse, and to corporations changing rules with little to no notification. The result is that it becomes accepted common practice, and the laws (or at least the application of law) become skewed towards accepting such things. So, even those of us who resisted the loss of privacy and control are nevertheless forced to give up privacy and control.
2. Online systems that trap user data hostage become so commonplace that you cannot "survive" without using them. That is, to do your job and to interact with other people online in the ways they "expect", you have to sign up for these services whether you like it or not. Yes, you can refrain from using them, but they become so deeply insinuated in the "common practice" of business and social networking that if you don't use them, you are at a disadvantage.
So, we can either sit on the sidelines, smug with the knowledge that we are not participating directly in the erosion of privacy and digital freedom... or we can proactively oppose any such system, by educating others about the potential dangers.
I'm not advocating nanny-state interference here, just proactive education, and publicly decrying privacy-infringing services.
But in the long term, I think competition can be good for the companies involved, too. (Not in all cases, of course, but in some sectors of the economy.) I think semiconductors is a pretty good example. Imagine if for the last 10 years we had only a single vendor of chips (Intel, AMD, IBM, whoever). This single vendor would feel very little competition, and would thus feel no pressure to innovate. The technology would advance much more slowly. The end result would actually be that people would be replacing their computers every 6-10 years instead of every 3-5 years. So, in short, they actual sell less volume, even if they keep all the volume for themselves, and can charge higher prices. (Higher prices means less volume, too.) Essentially, the frenetic "technological refresh" that we currently engage in is precisely what drives the semiconductor industry. This wouldn't exist without the constant innovation and competition.
It's natural for companies to want to always dominate, since this will always yield short-term gains. However I think companies in a vibrant, competitive sector of the economy can generate more money, overall, than if the competition didn't exist.
(Again, I fully accept that this won't always be the case. For example in established domains where there is a constant demand for a product, being a monopoly is "a license to print money," as they say.)
Another good listing of smallish software is Portable Apps. These are normal (open source) applications that have been fine-tuned to be "portable" so that you can run them off of a USB key for instance (e.g. they store settings locally).
Many of the apps were chosen because they are small and light. Others have been stripped to the minimum, so that they can fit comfortably on removable media (e.g. OpenOffice Portable is 69 MB instead of the usual 100 MB).
The PortableApps Suite is only 89MB and covers all the basics (office suite, browser, email, etc.).
If you're looking for a lightweight app to fill a particular need, it's a good place to start looking.
Indeed. Many of most our highly regarded social values/goals (freedom of speech, racial equality, etc.) are rather modern concepts. I would argue that in addition to the "moral high-ground" of such concepts, they brought with them considerable peace, progress, and prosperity (both intellectual, and even economic). The conclusion I hope people draw from this is that we must be on the lookout for new social values which will "elevate" our society.
Perhaps one of the hardest ideas to get across in the whole "intellectual property" debate is that, perhaps, there is some social value currently being ignored. Many people decry the "information wants to be free" rally as nothing more than "greedy pirates justifying their selfishness." While I will not deny that many people violate copyright law for purely selfish reasons, I again want to emphasize that there may be a deeper moral question... and that many opponents of the status quo may be deriving their opinions from that question.
I do not really think that a "no copyright" world is the right way to go... but there is a social value of "digital freedom" (or whatever you want to call it) that is not yet taken seriously, but I believe will be crucial to our advancement, as a society, in the coming years. I think we need to learn to accord fundamental respect to the pursuit of knowledge, to the free distribution of knowledge and culture. Yes, this needs to be balanced against incentives to artists and reward for contributing to society. However I believe the present climate where all ideas are "owned" is untenable and, ultimately, immoral.
Actually that's precisely the imbalance we now see in copyright law: their "rights" have been enshrined in new laws (DMCA) whereas our "rights" have not.
Previously, there was some sort of tenuous balance, though it wasn't specified by law: people could use copyrighted materials in certain ways (fair use), and companies were pretty much guaranteed that widespread infringement would be easy to deal with (since printing presses were big and expensive). In the modern age, the companies see their previous comfortable position being eroded (by copying and distribution becoming trivially easy). So they get new laws to give them back the comfort they previously had. They claim that this is their "right" and so now we have the DMCA, granting them these "rights."
The people, meanwhile, are seeing fair use eroding more every day (DRM, etc.). However, fair use has not been protected by any new laws. So companies can use technical measures to prevent fair use, and there's nothing we can (legally) do. The balance is gone.
Personally, I think the means of restoring the balance would be to repeal the DMCA and even scale back copyright law, rather than creating yet more laws.
The homepage for the Canadian National DNA Data Bank says that DNA samples are taken only from convicted criminals. The site says:(emphasis added)
Moreover, this page discusses debate (in 2005) about whether or not a DNA database could help with missing persons investigations. The discussion doesn't mention using an already-existing DNA database of all citizens (or all citizens born since 1994) but instead seems to discuss the creation of a new database. In the discussion about whether such a database should be created, they say: In short, this sounds like a proposal for a voluntary system where loved ones of a missing person could donate DNA samples to help locate the person or identify their remains. It makes no mention of an existing effort to retain DNA on all newborns since 1994.
Anyone have any further information on this subject?
(Anecdotally, I'm not aware of any such DNA testing on any children recently born in Canada--e.g. my nephew.)
In this essay, Crichton writes: Though this is a rather cynical interpretation of mainstream media, I've found the same thing. On any subject I consider myself knowledgeable, I have found mainstream media's reporting to be very lacking. As a result, I've given up trying to get useful information from those sources. Unfortunately, if you want to gain even a superficial understanding of a subject, you have to do some basic independent research, reading from different sources, engaging an expert in conversation, and so on.
I further question the patentability considering that "Internet Accountability Software" of various types already exist, such as: x3watch, accountable2you, InternetAccountability.com, etc. (Note: I have never used any of these products and have no affiliation with them.)
Apparently these systems send reports about internet surfing habits to other members of the community. The idea is to self-censor by willfully allowing another "accountability partner" to see what sites you're viewing. This self-imposed monitoring means that you will not intentionally view "unacceptable" content.
Having (briefly) looked over the MS patent, it seems only superficially different from what already exists: members of a self-censoring community flag content, and these ratings are used to block members of the community from access to the unacceptable content.
I need to correct myself (again). The article PDF is available for free download, but if you go to the article page and click on the "Request permission" link, you're brought to a new page where you can request permission to, for instance, print out copies for use in class. The form then tells you how much you have to pay them for those permissions.
The issue, of course, is that this explicitly violates the creative commons (noncommercial) license that he published under (and which the journal evidently agreed to, in order to be able to post his paper at all). The journal is thus illegally charging others for permissions that are free.
It still looks like a honest mistake. The structure of the website is such that a standard "permissions system" is being applied to a wide range of content for various journals. They seem to be mistakenly applying this system even to the open-access journals in the collection.
Even though this is probably just an honest mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. They are presently breaking the law and very much going against the spirit of the agreement that he entered into with them when he published his paper.
The authors write the papers, and do not receive any pay from the journal for that. The journal editors then forward the paper to reviewers. The reviewers are volunteers, not paid by the journal. Then the editors forward the paper (if accepted) to a typesetter, and it is published.
The authors and the reviewers are academics, who basically give their time to the journals. Their salaries come from government grants, from university funds (which come from tuition), and to some extent from corporate collaborations.
The salaries of the editors and typesetters are paid by the journal subscription charges. The subscriptions come primarily from academic libraries in universities or government research institutes. (Which are, again, funded by government grants and university funds.)
So, a very large percent of the money flowing into the journal comes from public funds (taxes). Significantly, the peer reviewers are volunteers, with their actual salaries coming largely from public funds. In a very real sense, our tax dollars are indeed paying for vetting the paper. The "valuable service" of which you speak is not performed by the journal, but by the academics (who do not benefit in any way from the toll-access that the journals impose).
The article he couldn't access was this one: "MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms" (doi 10.1093/nar/gkl774). I just tried accessing it from a non-subscription IP address, and I was able to load the PDF without issue. All the articles on the page seemed to load without asking for payment.
So, in short, this was probably an innocent mistake and seems to be already fixed.
After paying his >$2000 publication charge, the journal turned around and tried to charge others for access. As he points out, this could have been an innocent mistake on their part. But, it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed. I don't know if the word "bigoted" is warranted, but I agree that we scientists need to push for open access. Which is what he did, by publishing in an open-access journal.
One of the main limitations to ground-based optical telescopes (and one of the reasons that Hubble gets such amazing images) is that the atmosphere generates considerable distortion. Random fluctuations in the atmosphere cause images to be blurry (and cause stars to twinkle, of course). The technique they present appears to be taking images at very high-speed. They developed an algorithm that looks through the images, and identifies the ones that happen to not-blurry (hence "lucky"). By combining all the least blurry images (taken when the atmosphere just happened to be not introducing distortion), they can obtain clear images using ground-based telescopes (which are bigger than Hubble, obviously). I imagine the algorithm they've implemented tries to use sub-sections of images that are clear, to get as much data as possible.
Overall, a fairly clever technique. I wonder how this compares to adaptive optics, which is another solution to this problem. In adaptive optics, a guide laser beam is used to illuminate the atmosphere above the telescope. The measured distortion of the laser beam is used to distort the imaging mirror in the telescope (usually the mirror is segmented into a bunch of small independent sub-mirrors). The end result is that adaptive optics can essentially counter-act the atmospheric distortion, delivering crisp images from ground telescopes.
I would guess that adaptive optics produces better images (partly because it "keeps" all incident light, by refocusing it properly, rather than letting a large percentage of image acquisitions be "blurry" and eventually thrown away), but adaptive optics are no doubt expensive. The technique presented in TFA seems simple enough that it would be added to just about any telescope, increasing image quality at a sacrifice in acquisition time.
Your analysis of Microsoft's actions can be summarized as "never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained through incompetence."
Fair enough. None of us can know the exact motivations for why they pushed out a faulty standard. However, what we can do is predict Microsoft's future behavior in this case, by using their past actions as a guideline. Without being overly cynical, allow me to predict that Microsoft will not rectify the deficiencies in their standard. The reason is simple: it is not really in their best interest to do so, and it's easier to try to game the political system than to actually address technical issues.
Also, though I agree that "fail early, fail often" is indeed sometimes best in software development, I don't agree that this can be extended to standards. The purpose of a standard is to have something robust that everyone can agree on. Ideally it should be something that has already undergone some amount of "field testing" and proven itself to be up to the task. In the arena of software this usually means that multiple independent implementations are already available, proving that the standard achieves what it aims to achieve.
Pushing out a deficient standard for review by standards bodies is actually quite inefficient and frankly is wasting the time of the engineers and reviewers who must look over the documentation.
Indeed. The line-edge-roughness is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as the lithography industry searches for what to use for next-generation patterning technology. Based on the talks I've been to (I do research in a related field), the large efforts that were put into developing "extreme-ultraviolet lithography" (EUV), which would use 13.5 nm illumination, are not working out. The technology is not ready (e.g. they still don't have a light-source operating at that wavelength that generates enough light...) and is very much more expensive than anything we're using today. Many in the research end are now thinking that we cannot depend upon EUV to fill the future roadmap nodes.
I agree that there are going to have to be some big changes. Some sort of disruptive technology is going to be needed. One promising area is the rather simple concept of "nanoimprint lithography": where instead of using light to shine through a mask and pattern a polymer resist (which is then used to etch patterns into the silicon), you physically press a single (reusable) high-fidelity (high-cost) mask into a polymer, at a temperature where the polymer is liquid-like. The patterned polymer resist can then be used to etch Silicon in the usual way.
This physical embossing has been shown to generate pattern fidelity way beyond what you would naively expect: sub 30-nm feature accuracy has been demonstrated. Nanoimprint is a comparatively simple and cheap methodology. When combined with the other recent advances in lithography infrastructure (like high-precision registry alignment systems), it seems quite plausible that nanoimprint will be able to deliver the features required for next-generation chips. Of course, many details need to be worked out, but it's a very promising, and rather disruptive, new technology (and has been added to the ITRS roadmap).
The actual scientific paper can be found here (subscription required). This is a very neat idea, similar to buckling-induced experiments where similar nano-patterns can be produced quickly and easily in polymeric materials. The micrographs in the paper show remarkably clean and consistent structures, with well-defined periodicity and cross-section. From a scientific point alone, it's quite remarkable to see how one can harness a usually random process (fracture) to generate well-defined nanostructures.
That having been said, this technique suffers from a few limitations. Firstly, it will be difficult to scale this down to arbitrarily small features: polymer film stability becomes increasingly difficult as the film thickness is decreased, so this technique is unlikely to scale cleanly below the 60 nm they've already demonstrated. Also, this technique generates a large-area pattern, but it doesn't appear possible to control the registry of this pattern. So, this could perhaps be used as the first step in a mult-step chip patterning, but if you can't align subsequent patterns, it becomes useless for generating complex multi-layered structures for chips. (I can imagine ways to overcome this, but it wouldn't be easy.)
As such, I really don't think this is going to "revolutionize microchip patterning" as the headline implies. I don't think this will ever be used to generate smaller and smaller chips: the current challenges in the industry for next-generation processes are beyond what this technique can do. (Besides which, it doesn't integrate particularly well into the current photo-lithography infrastructures).
However, as a lower-cost alternative for fabricating nanostructures in the micron to 100 nm size regime, I could see this being useful. It's an easy way to create a large-area array of remarkably consistent patterns. It could be used to create optical gratings, or as a template for assembly of proteins (for diagnostics, etc.), or templates for magnetic domains (in hard-drives, etc.) and many other fields.
Moreover, with Microsoft in the video game market (both on PCs and via the XBox), they are very much implicated in the content-creation game. Microsoft also has a history of helping the media companies achieve their aims, such as agreeing to a per-unit fee on the Zune or implementing DRM in Vista. If Microsoft was actually serious about defending fair use, their operating system would make fair use easy instead of making it onerous.
The more I think about it, the more surprising this move on Microsoft's part becomes. I guess it just comes down to Microsoft being a company so large (and poorly guided?) that different divisions can have wildly different priorities. Some parts of Microsoft would also love for you to pay a fee everytime copyrighted content is transmitted, viewed or discussed. Other parts of Microsoft only have value so long as fair use is protected.
In any case, I expect their support of fair use to be one of convenience, and hence tenuous at best. Google, on the other hand, are a valuable example of fair use being innovative and driving the economy.
The fact that a CD and a DVD cost the same amount, even though the production costs are orders-of-magnitude different, means that:
(1) A CD album sells far fewer copies than a DVD of a movie does. Thus, the price needs to be higher to recoup costs; or
(2) The price we pay is not really correlated to the production cost. In particular, the claims that the cost of a CD is required to pay all the people involved in the production of the work is greatly exaggerated.
We all know that a merchant feels no particular desire to sell something at a lower cost if people are buying it at a higher cost. In that sense, the cost of goods is never correlated to the production cost, but only based upon the price the market is willing to bear.
On the other hand, in any sector of the economy where there is competition the price of a good on the free market will be driven down closer to the production cost, because one company will always be willing to undercut another company, right up until the point where they can no longer pay for production (and staff, and reasonable return-on-investment, etc.). However, where there is no competition, the price can be inflated arbitrarily high above the production cost.
Again, it's pretty obvious, but I'll say it anyways: The high price of CDs and DVDs is because the market is dominated by a monopoly, devoid of competition.
(Unfortunately, the $ millions overpaid by Canadians on the blank media levy will apparently not be refunded to consumers.)
You appear not to care about the "guaranteed to remain so" part. That's fine. But understand that many among us find closing the source of code that was freely distributed to be rather unfriendly... and we're using copyright law as a tool to help guarantee that the code remains free. This guarantee helps encourage more people to create and to release (because many people would not release their code if they knew that others would commercialize/extend it without giving back). That is, copyright law is achieving, in this case, its stated goal: to encourage the production and dissemination of content.
That, in my mind, is the brilliance of the GPL: it co-opts copyright law, uses it in an unconventional way, and thereby achieves the fundamental purpose of copyright law: to give an incentive for creation and free distribution of creative works.
At a minimum, document everything and send a report to the GPL-violations homepage (in particular, refer to contact info). That website tracks GPL violations and is in contact with the FSF. They will probably pass the information along to those whose copyright is being infringed, so that they can take direct action.
The normal course of action is that the authors of the GPL code will send friendly "please comply with the license" messages. Usually the infringing party will comply with the GPL before threat of lawsuits are mentioned.
It's definitely unfortunate that consistent policing of proprietary vendors is necessary (they, of all people, should know better!)... but ultimately I think most projects can be made to comply with the GPL without too much trouble, once they are uncovered.
So, in short, document your findings and notify the appropriate people!
That's really too bad, because obviously important tech decisions should not be made based on the product name. If the product does the job, then that's what should matters. Besides, many software names sound goofy until you get used to them--I'm sure some people thought "Dreamweaver" was a rather ambiguous and strange-sounding name, but once it attains mindshare, the name gains the appropriate recognition. Same goes for "Powerpoint," "Photoshop," "Apache," and so on.
Besides, as others have pointed out, the discussion should not have gotten to "Feisty Fawn" in any case. That would be like discounting Windows Vista because "Longhorn" sounds silly. "Longhorn" was a pre-release code-name, with the final release called "Windows Vista." Similarly, "Feisty Fawn" is a pre-release code-name, with the final release called "Ubuntu 7.04."
I don't want to insult your coworkers, but as far as I'm concerned, allowing jokes about a product name to cloud one's technical judgment is not at all professional. And I really don't think the solution is to refrain from using pre-release code-names (which are helpful to the programmers)... because people making unprofessional judgments will just focus their baseless ridicule on something else (icons, artwork, color scheme, website, forums, personalities of people involved, etc.).
Sure, publicly-funded research builds on privately-funded research, and vice versa. Sure, labs will sometimes receive a mixture of funding, receiving university funds (which derive from tuition), government funds (which derive from taxes), and corporate money (which derive from economic activity). But, you're mixing up the "corporate funding" with "corporate publishers." The two groups are totally distinct.
The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!
Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*
The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.
(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)
The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways? You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.
In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.
In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.
In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.