I taught graphics and programming classes to middle- and high-school students for a couple summers, and that was a lot of fun.
One question: what in particular do you want to teach? You mention that you're supposed to teach "computers", but "computers != programming". Indeed, I wouldn't endeavor to teach programming to anyone that didn't explicitly say they wanted to learn it. If you're going to be dealing with a random sample of students from an average classroom, I'm guessing most couldn't care less about programming.
Were I in your position, I'd play around with Photoshop (or perhaps even something simpler), publish a simple webpage, browse through the web, etc. Also, I'd pull out Quake or some other FPS -- seriously. I'd probably get some tame Mod so there isn't blood flying all over the place, but I think it makes perfect sense to introduce them to gaming (if they aren't already L337).
When I was teaching graphics, I pulled out the Duke Nukem' level editor -- it worked fantastically. It was easy to use, and extremely rewarding with plenty of instant gratification. At the end we had competitions in each others levels -- it was a ton of fun.
However, I wouldn't in any way assume that kids want to learn programming. That is a nightmarish situation to force-feed.
Is it just me or is the title of this article 50%wrong? There is nothing in that document that says the UK won't allow software patents (although it did say that it will disallow business method patents). As quoted:
"19:... and technological innovations should not cease to be patentable merely because the innovation lies in software."
I see no way that this could be construed as saying software patents are forbidden.
Some of the comments seem to be implying that this is for people to do "Thin-client" computing for moving everything onto massive servers to offload the client. I haven't looked closely, but I think this is a bit off -- I'm under the impression that this initiative (if you can call it that) is about creating a mechanism whereby autonomous programs can locate and utilize each other. It has nothing to do with the end user, it's just like a mega-ORB/JINI/EJB system where you can index a worldwide database of components and use them as needed.
I'm guessing that Blue Tooth and IR will become more prevalent for many connections, which are not Internet based at all. If you have a PDA and a laptop, even though both *could* communicate via the Internet (pehaps the PDA has a wireless modem) it might be more convenient to simply use a point-to-point connection. Likewise, putting everything onto one single network (the Internet) might just not make sense, if for nothing else, security reasons. I may not want everyone in the world to access my PDA whenever I log on to synchronize, especially as the number of devices increase and (possibly firmware) exploits are found.
The Internet is a great tool for global communication, but I think that local connections might be more suited to a point-to-point communication technology. As device pervasiveness increases and proximity based tasks outpace the bandwidth constraints of cellular networks, point-to-point communication might complement the Internet quite nicely.
Does anyone have any good experience with CodeWarrior for cross-platform development (ie, actually developing both *on* and *for* multiple platforms)? What do you do for source control across multiple platforms: just CVS? I hear that Codewarrior is going to support CVS soon, any word?
I realize that it's been said time and time again but I didn't see it in reply to this particular message.
Intellectual property will never "work". It's attempting to do something that just doesn't make sense -- we mine as well try to charge for access to the sun. Something as limitless as information (if I have an idea, and I give you the idea, I still have the original idea) cannot be treated like property because it just doesn't behave like property (which is a limited resource commodity where each unit has a duplication cost, and where if I have a unit, and I give you a unit, I have one less unit).
It just doesn't work, and it'll only get more and more painful as long as we try to pretend that it can be controlled.
But there is another option, and that is to eliminate the concept altogether. There is no reason that the concept of informational property is required for society to function, and without some fatally flawed concept undermining our culture, we would be far more healthy without it.
The goal is to recognize that we're dependent upon a sinking ship, and to plan an escape route that allows for as many people to be saved as possible.
Or, we can just slap more duct-tape on what we've got and leave it for later generations to sort out.
Secondarily, how would it be profitable to decieve the customer? You give two examples, Coke and Red Hat.
Let's say you went to the store and bought something named "Peanut Butter", but actually got "Jelly". You'd be upset with the store for mis-labeling what it was. You'd take it back to the store and demand a refund. It would be foolish for a company to simply sell the wrong thing, as they'd be upsetting the customer.
Likewise, you go to a store and buy something named "Coke", but instead get what you believe is "Pepsi". Why would they do that? Both are equally cheap, why not make the one that your customer wants?
Same goes with Red Hat. It's a great example because it's all under GPL -- if MacMillan wanted to sell a CD labeled Red Hat, and there is nothing stopping them from selling the *actual* Red Hat, why wouldn't they?
The big problem that Trademarks attempt to address is that of companies actively attempting to deceive the customer as to the source of the product (say, MacMillan may want to undermine Red Hat by selling buggy software that looks like the Red Hat distro). However, this all comes down to people being reliant upon the mapping of Name to Company, something that isn't inherently reliable (there is nothing physically preventing me setting up shop and naming myself Microsoft, so we fabricated legality to prevent it). The basis of Trademark is again unstable, as it's attempting to do something that is fictional. Basically, the Trademark's main purpose is to solve a problem that was created with the Trademark, namely supporting the assumption that there is only one company with a particular name. Again, however, this doesn't *need* to be the case.
Take, for example, the town smithy, named "Bob's Blacksmithing". Now, say another smith moved into town, and was also named Bob, and set up a second shop, also named "Bob's Blacksmithing". There's a conflict. Realistically, both Bob's would recognize that it's in both of their best interests for one of them to choose a name, and it would be courteous for the second Bob to concede. However, this doesn't *need* to be the case. I don't see it as Wrong for the second Bob to use the name -- after all, the name is every bit as legitmate for the first Bob as it is for the second Bob.
Names are fictional things, and duct-tape is required to support the illusion that they're unique. We're really far down the path now, perhaps irrevocably, but we didn't need to take this path. We could've instead say "Well, we recognize that a name isn't a good indicator of who we're dealing with, so let's find a different, more accurate way."
So, assume that in this town they decided to take the second path, where it is perfectly legal for the second Bob's shop to be named the same as the first Bob's. Faced with a conflict, they need to go further, past the fictional name, and find some deeper underlying difference betweeen the two shops, such as the North shop and the South shop, or Old shop and New shop -- objective, unique identifiers. Problem solved, no legal bills for either party.
Now, let's take it further and assume that a thousand Bob's move into town and all make identically named shops. Cardinal directions no longer apply, so identifying a particular shop requires more precision, such as "the shop on 7th and 4th". Again, problem solved, no legal bills.
Names are fictional things, and are in no way guaranteed unique. Assuming that they are unique is foolish, and an unstable basis for a system. Accepting that names are not unique leads to the creation of a stable, more accurate system that is based upon truly unique features, such as physical location, DNS entries, IP addresses, etc.
Don't think it will work? Do you think that it's impossible to differentiate between a thousand identically named and stocked business scattered all throughout town, and that consumers will freak and businesses will ultimately fail because of the resulting confusion? If so, please explain to me the existence of 7-11.
Hm... I see what you're saying, but I think of it in a different way.
You seem to be implying that a company could make due with any plot of land equally well, which is never really the case. Every business has geographical needs (warehouses need to be near shipping routes, factories near water for cooling, mining near mineral deposits, resturants near customers, etc). Likewise, the same plot of land may be more or less "intrinsically" valuable to a particular company depending on their needs, regardless of whether or not they own it. So, I may purchase land that I know contains oil deposits, not because I'm interested in drilling for oil, but because I know that others are. Even if this oil field is right next door to Exxon and particularly convenient for them as they could really use it well, it doesn't mean they have implicit rights to it.
DNS entries are exactly the same. Some entries are more valuable than others to a particular company depending on its unique needs. Just because a particular entry would be really convenient for a company because it happens to be somewhat similar to one of their trademarks doesn't mean that they have implicit rights.
Currently people aberrantly believe that the only way that a company can be found is by trying it's company name with a.com appended. This is plainly not the case. As more and more companies come online, it will be come more and more unreliable to assume that appending.com to the most commonly used name of a company will work. For examples, try looking up a couple game companies: 'id' that makes Doom/Quake, 'Origin' that makes Ultima/Wing Commander, 'Epic Megagames' that makes Unreal, etc. by using the ".com approach". Then try it using Yahoo. Which is quicker and more reliable?
By assuming that just because the entry happens to correspond to something that looks sorta like a trademark that somebody owns it and that it will get you where you want to go (not to mention those times when "legitmate" conflicts arise when two people have trademarked the same word in different industries), we get a system that can't even in theory work well for a large number of companies.
However, by acknowledging that that just plainly won't work, we can become more reliant upon a system where the mapping from company name to IP is is more accurate (ie, search engines, portals).
As long as society is reliant upon this nonfunctional system for finding the proper website, the System is biased toward the large corporation (again). 1) recognizable DNS entries are finite 2) multiple people have uses for the same DNS entries 3) there is no clearly objective rule that indicates the correct owner 4) subjective answers are never "right" nor "wrong", but merely opinions 5) contests between DNS owners come down to opinion vs opinion 6) the only solutions are for a) one side to concede or for b) the government to make a choice 7) conceding means losing valuable property due to someone else's opinions 8) having the government choose means spending tremendous amounts on legal bills with uncertain results, and in the end possibly losing valuable property due to someone else's opinions
I don't disagree that this will sorta work. I just think that it's highly biased toward the "big" guy with the deep pockets.
You're assuming that the existing system would work entirely unaltered with the concept of Trademarks removed, which I never suggested. I agree that products that rely upon a brand-name to be sold wouldn't fly, and I'm ok with this.
Again, this gets back to the concept of information as property. Coca-Cola didn't invent the flavor "Coke" -- they just happened to find it. Anyone can mix together the same ingredients and create "Coke", but currently we don't allow that because we grant a temporary monopoly over the recipe for and the name of Coke. This I say is silly. It doesn't make sense for one company to have complete control over an idea -- why not have Coca-cola simply be a service provider in that they will create Coke, distribute and sell it, as a service. The product that they create costs basically nothing, but the service they provide in terms of canning and distribution is very valuable. In this way if there is someone closer that makes Coke better (perhaps with higher quality ingredients, for Coke enthusiasts) or fresher or whatever, then they could build a business model on this.
Right now brand name is more important than quality to sell a product, and I see that as a problem. If the strength of a brand name (via the removing of the monopoly power over that word) was diminshed, it would seem that people would need to compete on quality alone.
I see it like the blacksmiths and butchers of yore -- there were probably a thousand differnet shops named "Bob's butchery", but it didn't matter because the name wasn't important, the product was.
I'm not saying that Trademarks should be eliminated right now, I'm merely attempting to illustrate that society would not collapse and would in fact continue to function normally were we to restructure the system such that information would not be treated as proprety.
I agree that it may be in our best interests to not persue such a thing, and I'd encourage everyone to debate the issue from this perspective. See the title -- I'm not "pro-GE" I'm just "pro-logic".
"But wait," you say, "there are *some* things that we can all agree are bad."
I can assure you, I would never even suggest such a thing.:)
Diversity of the genome is a *good* thing. GEing our children will do nothing to make the genome more diverse, and everything to make it conform to some "ideal" that might not be.
True, but keep in mind that what the "ideal" isn't constant. Currently people dream of being "ideal" because it's unique -- nobody is "ideal". If everyone had (for example -- I'm not sure what your conception of ideal is) blonde hair and blue eyes, then nobody would want them. People don't dream of homoginzation, they dream of distinguishing themselves from the masses in some way. It just turns out that people tend to persue the same paths thinking "I'm at point A, nobody is at point B, I'll go there to be different!" not realizing that everyone else is thinking the same thing.
Wait a minute... you say "people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property". But they do. It is you who suddenly doesn't want to.
I'm merely saying that people are inconsistant with the concept of ownership of information, and people like the idea of owning a song, but don't like the idea of owning a DNS entry.
...and suddenly, you want to reset the game and keep DNS outside of of trademark law.
That's assuming that DNS is already part of trademark law, which I don't believe is resolved yet. My current take is that people are in the process of determining whether or not DNS entries are equivelant to product/company names, and what I'm saying is that they're not -- they're merely addresses. Big companies like to push their trademark wherever they can because it gives them ammunition in the courtroom, and they're pushing really hard right now because it's still uncertain. I'm simply pushing back.
Many companies have invested good money giving "meaning" to their trademarks...
While I think that Trademarks are a bad idea all around, I'm not advocating the complete elimination of them right now (although I may later). I'm simply against infecting a new system (DNS) with the Trademark affliction. Trademarks can and will exist just fine even if it's determined that DNS entries are merely street names.
I think you mean "abstract", right?
Hmm.. I think both technically work, but I prefer the implied connotation of "fictional". Abstract implies that it's a correct interpretation viewed from a different perspective, whereas Fictional implies that it's merely one interpretation and it is quite likely out of touch with reality. I'm not saying that the laws are fictional, I'm saying that intellectual property isn't a Real thing -- it has no quantitative, objective and scientific measurement, and hence I say it's fictional. But, this may be merely a semantics issue.
There is nobody out there except a few anarchists and nihilists who don't believe in the principles behind trademark law, and this includes you.
"Never say Never." I do, in fact, disagree with Trademark law, and would prefer that Coke didn't own and couldn't legally control the name Coke. I would prefer that anybody could can and label something as coke (note this doesn't mean that they'd be free from FDA regulation). Companies would still make and can coke, and they'd compete based on the quality of their instantiation of the global concept of what "Coke" tastes like, and all would be dandy. Coke would still be made, and it may not taste the same everywhere, but I'd learn which machine gives me the coke that I like the best and theoretically, due to the competition, quality would go up and prices would come down. In addition, perhaps society would develop in such a fashion that "Tommy Hilfiger", "Coke", "Nike" and other major brand names wouldn't take up such an extreme amount of social energy.
Trademarks are the healthiest form of IP, but I'm not convinced that we couldn't do without it and be better off. Companies like to make money, and one way of doing that is selling products, and selling products requires trust from the consumer, and there are other ways to get trust from the consumer aside from a brand name. Business worked for literally thousands of years without trademark, and we managed to make it here.
Like so many posters are noticing, we give up some freedom when we allow ownership of names; At least let's minimize that by not giving up freedom for nothing.
I agree that at times this is useful. I just don't think that now is one of those times.
Ahh, I think I see what you mean. You're saying that because land property doesn't have a fixed price, it's incomparable to DNS entries. If this is the case, I'd still disagree.
First, land did have a fixed price from the start, and only after people bought up all the land did it start to operate based upon the supply/demand model. We're in the first phase now for the DNS entries -- people are buying up all the land at a cheap fixed price. Once all the land is bought, it will operate according to supply/demand. So, it still appears to me to be a valid analogy.
But it appears that you disagree with this -- what am I missing?
Intellectual property didn't exist for the vast majority of human history. It didn't exist throughout Shakespeare's life, nor Bach's, nor Newton, nor a thousand other information creators that are well known and respected. Your argument that information wouldn't get created because *this particular* method of reward is eliminated doesn't seem convincing to me.
I agree that people like to be rewarded for their effort. I think that there are other methods of reward that make sense and don't require extreme counter-intuitive and fictional concepts of property to get them done. Information in and of itself is worthless: something with infinite supply has no demand, and hence, no value. However, the *creation* of information is valuable, because creation takes time and time is not limitless (well, in terms of a fraction of a lifespan). So, if those that product information charged up front for their effort, they wouldn't need to rely upon some completely arbitrary idea that somehow they own what they invent.
If people really *owned* ideas, should Newton be paid royalties for every time a plane flies, a car moves, and an apple falls? No, that's crazy. He didn't invent the concepts of gravity, he just discovered them.
Likewise, should Shakespeare be paid for every time someone used the theme of two lovers from different tribes? No, he didn't invent that idea, he simply discovered it and publicized it.
Finally, should somebody be paid for every time someone reads a book? No, they didn't invent those words, they merely discovered that arranging them in a certain fashion happens to produce a story.
An adjacent Acre Y lies between Company X and the nearest highway. There is a sign marked "Company X" on Acre Y.
If X put the sign on Y without owning it, that was their mistake. They took a big risk by investing in Y (by putting their sign upon it and having their customers reliant upon Y having their sign) without owning it.
Squatter Z comes along and buys Acre Y between Company X's headquarters and the nearest highway at $50, before Company X had a chance to.
If they had a chance to put a sign on it and make their business reliant upon it, why didn't they have the chance to buy it before Z came along? This rebuttal seems a bit unrealistic.
Domain napping is obviously not a good thing, and I don't think there is anyone here who isn't pissed off a the companies that buy up hundreds of domains to try to auction them off later: but having vague intention (goodwill or badwill) based laws enacted to govern over the web is so much worse.
I'm not.
Could you give me a rational explanation that is based on something other than "well, it's just Bad" or "I'm jealous that I didn't think of it first"? Likewise "it infringes upon Trademark" assumes that trademarks apply to DNS (and also assumes that Trademarks have a rational basis), and if you belive this, please also explain why I shouldn't be able to start a burger shop on "McDonald's" street, which is essentially exactly the same scenario.
The biggest problem people have with trying to sell information is that there is a limitless supply -- treating it like property just doesn't work (value=demand/supply, supply=infinity, value=0).
However, in the case of DNS entries, it actually *does* work as property (value=demand/supply, supply=some fixed amount, value!=0). The funniest part of this is that people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property!
The whole concept of "squatting" as somehow Bad is very silly. If I "squat" on some land next to a city, someone that wants to build a business on that land must purchase it, even if I just let it sit there "unused" (although waiting for its value to rise is a perfectly legitimate use). This makes perfect sense and is seen as a very reputable trade.
However, in the case of DNS entries, which seems to me to be exactly the same, people don't like this anymore.
The problem isn't with people "squatting" on DNS entries, the problem is that people seem to think that they "own" the name. The idea of owning a name, owning a bit of information, is silly. It's completely fictional and requires extreme duct-tape to make sort of functional. For a long while we could sorta do it because duplication was kinda expensive and not many people wanted to do it so the makeshift legality wasn't too heinous. But those days are over. It never made sense to treat information as property, and now it doesn't even work a little bit.
As long as we have this fictional and totally unnecessary concept of Intellectual Property, there will always be cases like this. People will claim ownership over the technique of storing credit card information on their servers for "1 click" service, for the transfer of music files over the internet, for using the XOR function to blit and remove images to the screen. As long as IP exists, we'll be battered with one after another absurdity.
Intellectual Property was a bad idea to begin with, and it's only getting worse.
Though marriage among smart people often produce smart children, that is by no means guaranteed.
True, genetics isn't the sole factor in intelligence. However, your statement applies equally well against GE.
With GE, one can reliably produce an entire race of a type of people, ie. an intellectual race that would have their pleasure center stimulated every time they learn or a worker race that gets their pleasure center stimulated for working and obeying but their pain center stimulated trying to come up with new ideas or learning.
This seems to imply that the government would be deciding who gets what sort of GE, which I wasn't imagining would be the case (although it's not beyond the realm of reason). If that is the case, I agree, we'd be screwed. However, I was thinking that GE would only occur when parents desire the operation upon their children. As such, the scenario wouldn't be the case (unless lots of parents decided to turn their children into worker drones, which perhaps a tax break could encourage...).
EXACTLY, would you like that kind of screening to be extended to every aspect of life? Besides, insurances use statistics which have high uncertainties. But if one was engineered, that uncertainty goes away.
Assuming, of course, that it were completely possible to extrapolate a person's life out of there genes, which isn't the case as environment is a huge factor. However, I agree that genes are a huge factor, and many people may desire to have this information before hiring. But, this is a similar situation to racism, and people are pretty down on that so I doubt they'd be keen on the idea of genetic screening for applicants, and a number of laws would surely develop, just as to protect against racism.
Ah... but they do!! That is what the resume is for. For example, if you left out a year in a resume, employers would ask what you did then (Jail time is often implied).
Um.. I was meaning ancestral information, which is rarely asked for in most situations.
One reason education cannot guarantee results is because you don't know which method of education the child would be receptive to because there can be infinite. If you can control genes, then you control one input, then you can use that control applied to a variety of education method and find the best way. Governments may encourage that as it would produce loyal citizens and make education cheaper.
Again, this is assuming that GE modifications were forced upon people, which I'm hoping wouldn't be the case. However, if this knowledge were known, it would be possible to know the best way to teach people, and education quality would skyrocket.
So, while I agree that things would suck if the Gov were in charge of GE modifying everyone, parents GE modifying children may not have adverse societial effects (any more than existing situations).
First of all, the movie's hero was a "natural" child that showed he was superior to the "engineered" peers. And it never said that the engineered children were any *worse* than the natural ones. So, I'd say that the message isn't so much "Genetic engineering is bad practice", but "Assuming that genetic engineering solves all problems is bad practice."
Most arguments I've heard about this issue come down to two issues: fear and jealousy.
"People will get jealous because they didn't (get the opportunity to) take advantage of GE, and they'll revolt." How is this any different than people being jealous that they didn't get higher education, or didn't have the wealth to get into a private school? Or, how is this different than countries being jealous that their histories didn't lead them to opulance and instead led them to poverty? This seems to me to be just like any other rich/poor scenario. And this is all perfectly natural. Agreed, it's best to structure things so that an action is persued in such a fashion to avoid conflict, but that doesn't mean that the action can't take place. This could be better phrased "There is danger that such technology could upset people, so care should be taken to avoid conflict, perhaps by offering it to everyone equally."
"A superhuman race will form, and the normals will be inferior." Again, how is this bad? Those that have (or are perceived to have) better skills will get hired. Should it be any other way? Would you prefer that this "Superhuman" race would develop, and they wouldn't be treated any differently? Also, do you think that this "Superhuman" race hasn't already developed? If you believe in genetics, don't you believe that smart people usually reproduce with smart people, and that this race is already in existence? Likewise, we are already all judged by our ancestry in at least one area: health insurance. If people were truly as obsessed with genetics as Gattaca seemed to imply, people would request personal histories before hiring.
"From birth your destiny will be controlled by your genes." The point is getting old, but this is already in effect. Your life is a direct result of how you were developed -- if your environment invested in your education, you became successful. If it didn't, you won't. Both your genes and your envirionment are mainly out of your control, and this will be the case with or without genetic engineering.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could actually hurt themselves by doing it." This is a good cautionary note, but again doesn't mean outright avoidance. If it does indeed turn out that GE actually weakens people (ie, causes degenerative damage, shortens lifespans, etc) then they took a risk that failed, so be it.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could hurt me by doing it." And this makes perfect sense. We don't know what kind of crap could happen. We could create some sort of bizarre virus that affects millions, or who knows. This is by far the best argument against it in my book, but sadly rarely comes up.
These are all interesting points, but most could be made about private schools, music tutors, and genetically engineered crops as well. Jealousy that you or your offspring won't be one of the "superior" race just doesn't to me seem a valid argument against something that could very well lead to stepping the net intelligence of humanity up a notch. Likewise fear that something Bad would happen with this technology can be offset by slow and cautious progress. Neither fear nor jealousy are objectively convincing arguments for why it shouldn't be done. And without objective arguments, it will be done. Perhaps not tomorrow, but a genetic superrace will develop in the near future. Perhaps it'll be called "genetic vaccinations" or "mental health augmentations" or whatever, but there will always be people that are exploiting risky and experimental medical treatments to attempt to better there lives. If you don't like it, figure out a way to eliminate the demand, and then the supply won't be an issue. If you can't figure out a way to convince people that they shouldn't want it, perhaps it is you that needs convincing.
Why exactly is squatting bad? People buy property around cities not because they want to develop it, but because they think it will be valuable to other people that may want to develop it. Is this "squatting" as well, and is it bad? If not, how is it different than Domain Names?
It would seem to me that domain names are equivalent to street names: if I open up a hamburger shop on "McDonald's Ave." nobody would ever claim that I am infringing upon somebody's trademark and that I should move my company. However, this is exactly what people are suggesting for domain names. Saying domain names are somehow "rightfully" owned by somebody other than the entity who purchased them is as absurd as saying that McDonalds owns all the property surrounding its resturants, even if it never bothered to purchase it.
Domain names are a limited resource, and hence obey supply and demand.
There are a couple of ways this system could work, the simplest being what we currently have: first come first served. This FCFS system is effectively treating domain names like land property -- whoever owns the land controls how it is used, regardless of whether or not somebody else could use it "better" (a subjective and essentially meaningless term). With this mindset, it is totally absurd to even suggest that somebody else could "claim" a domain that they don't own (minus the government, of course) -- it would be like McDonald's claiming to own the property next to it's resturants, or claiming to own all the land that is on all roads named "McDonald", "McDonald's", "MacDonalds", etc. I understand that it's important for companies to protect their trademarks, but the location of their business (their domanin name is merely a convenient, easy to remember name for their business location -- like saying "the corner of 5th and 7th") is completely unrelated to this.
Now, some may say "But some companies name themselves based upon their location: Amazon.com, EBay.com, etc." This works just fine as long as you own the location -- it would be like me naming my resturant "5th and 7th". However, if I name my business as such *before* purchasing the land, and it turns out that somebody else owns that land, I have no claim upon it.
By saying that companies somehow own all the land associated with their name, it is yet another way that The System is biased toward the large corporations over the small companies. First we must recognize that none of what we talk about is handed to us from God or written in stone -- there are no intrinsic Rights involved. As such, whatever we say you "can" and "cannot" do is purely fictional, and purely up to us to decide. We can decide to create a system that doesn't make any sense and ends up benefiting only those people that can pay enough in legal fees to keep the issue so clouded up that it will never be resolved, or we can choose to make a system that is simple and self regulating. By saying that trademark owners somehow have implicit Rights concerning domain names, we have a system that is chaotic and totally subjective -- there is no objective way to measure who is "right". If, on the other hand, we create system where domain names are owned by a single entity, there is no fuzziness to the issue, and we can objectively ask "Who owns this Domain Name", an it can be resolved without conflict or bias by looking at the deed.
I'd say it all comes down to optimizing costs. Currently, for whatever reason, buggy products still make money.
There's some sort of cost relationship between product stability, feature lists, and usability. Businesses, as in any industry, manage those costs to generate the most revenue in the shortest time and for the smallest investment.
Labeling buggy products as Bad is as meaningless as labeling super-featured products as Good. It's an entirely subjective experience that ultimately is resolved at the cash-register. That which makes the most money at the least risk will always win.
Customers don't realize that short term wins (acquring products quickly and cheaply) have long term consequences (platform stability, overall software quality). Currently customers don't have the skills or experience to work factors into their own cost minimization equations, so they're effectively "weighted" at zero.
As the industry matures people will surely start to pay attention to these things, and businesses will have to account for this to remain profitable.
The big problem is that due to the institutional ignorance of the human population, The Masses are easily manipulated for the profit of The Individual. The current lack of understanding of the customer base has proven to be very profitable, so large corporations find it safer to continue to rely upon (and even take pains to ensure the existance of) this ignorance than to take a risk upon developing good software to satisfy a small (and statistically shrinking?) group of enlightened users.
As long as The System allows The Corporations to manipulate The Masses for their own profit, this will continue to be the case. The goal is for The Masses, and through them, The Government, to recognize that corporations are only *allowed* to exist because they are a tool believed to assist in increasing the standards of living for The Masses. Once this understanding is gained, then The Masses, via The Government can reshape the public tool called the corporation for their own benefit.
Survival of the fittest is something that occurs on a large variety of traits. The most obvious of those are physical strength, reproductive strategy, environmental adaptation, etc. However, I don't see why there isn't a "coolness" trait as well. A T-rex would be evolutionarily superior to some boring dinosaur even though both are extinct exactly because it has a better chance of being resurrected.
Because humans exist as part of nature, anything we do is a completely natural process. In addition, let's define fitness as 'the ability to exploit natural processes for propagating DNA patterns'. This seems to imply that animals that are able to exploit the natural process of the human tendancy to ressurect animals and plants that we see as "cool" would be evolutionary fit.
As such, the cloning of 'extinct' species (which presumably means those species that don't currently have any living representatives) is every bit a legitmate method of DNA propagation as sexual reproduction. Given millions or billions of years of cloning being part of the natural process of DNA propagation, the ability to take advantage of that may be more important to long term survival than any other method. It's theoretically possible that life could develop, or we could develop life that relies completely upon cloning for survival (read: Terminator gene technology).
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I taught graphics and programming classes to middle- and high-school students for a couple summers, and that was a lot of fun.
One question: what in particular do you want to teach? You mention that you're supposed to teach "computers", but "computers != programming". Indeed, I wouldn't endeavor to teach programming to anyone that didn't explicitly say they wanted to learn it. If you're going to be dealing with a random sample of students from an average classroom, I'm guessing most couldn't care less about programming.
Were I in your position, I'd play around with Photoshop (or perhaps even something simpler), publish a simple webpage, browse through the web, etc. Also, I'd pull out Quake or some other FPS -- seriously. I'd probably get some tame Mod so there isn't blood flying all over the place, but I think it makes perfect sense to introduce them to gaming (if they aren't already L337).
When I was teaching graphics, I pulled out the Duke Nukem' level editor -- it worked fantastically. It was easy to use, and extremely rewarding with plenty of instant gratification. At the end we had competitions in each others levels -- it was a ton of fun.
However, I wouldn't in any way assume that kids want to learn programming. That is a nightmarish situation to force-feed.
Is it just me or is the title of this article 50%wrong? There is nothing in that document that says the UK won't allow software patents (although it did say that it will disallow business method patents). As quoted:
... and technological innovations should not cease to be patentable merely because the innovation lies in software."
"19:
I see no way that this could be construed as saying software patents are forbidden.
Some of the comments seem to be implying that this is for people to do "Thin-client" computing for moving everything onto massive servers to offload the client. I haven't looked closely, but I think this is a bit off -- I'm under the impression that this initiative (if you can call it that) is about creating a mechanism whereby autonomous programs can locate and utilize each other. It has nothing to do with the end user, it's just like a mega-ORB/JINI/EJB system where you can index a worldwide database of components and use them as needed.
I'm guessing that Blue Tooth and IR will become more prevalent for many connections, which are not Internet based at all. If you have a PDA and a laptop, even though both *could* communicate via the Internet (pehaps the PDA has a wireless modem) it might be more convenient to simply use a point-to-point connection. Likewise, putting everything onto one single network (the Internet) might just not make sense, if for nothing else, security reasons. I may not want everyone in the world to access my PDA whenever I log on to synchronize, especially as the number of devices increase and (possibly firmware) exploits are found.
The Internet is a great tool for global communication, but I think that local connections might be more suited to a point-to-point communication technology. As device pervasiveness increases and proximity based tasks outpace the bandwidth constraints of cellular networks, point-to-point communication might complement the Internet quite nicely.
-quinthar
Does anyone have any good experience with CodeWarrior for cross-platform development (ie, actually developing both *on* and *for* multiple platforms)? What do you do for source control across multiple platforms: just CVS? I hear that Codewarrior is going to support CVS soon, any word?
I realize that it's been said time and time again but I didn't see it in reply to this particular message.
Intellectual property will never "work". It's attempting to do something that just doesn't make sense -- we mine as well try to charge for access to the sun. Something as limitless as information (if I have an idea, and I give you the idea, I still have the original idea) cannot be treated like property because it just doesn't behave like property (which is a limited resource commodity where each unit has a duplication cost, and where if I have a unit, and I give you a unit, I have one less unit).
It just doesn't work, and it'll only get more and more painful as long as we try to pretend that it can be controlled.
But there is another option, and that is to eliminate the concept altogether. There is no reason that the concept of informational property is required for society to function, and without some fatally flawed concept undermining our culture, we would be far more healthy without it.
The goal is to recognize that we're dependent upon a sinking ship, and to plan an escape route that allows for as many people to be saved as possible.
Or, we can just slap more duct-tape on what we've got and leave it for later generations to sort out.
Secondarily, how would it be profitable to decieve the customer? You give two examples, Coke and Red Hat.
Let's say you went to the store and bought something named "Peanut Butter", but actually got "Jelly". You'd be upset with the store for mis-labeling what it was. You'd take it back to the store and demand a refund. It would be foolish for a company to simply sell the wrong thing, as they'd be upsetting the customer.
Likewise, you go to a store and buy something named "Coke", but instead get what you believe is "Pepsi". Why would they do that? Both are equally cheap, why not make the one that your customer wants?
Same goes with Red Hat. It's a great example because it's all under GPL -- if MacMillan wanted to sell a CD labeled Red Hat, and there is nothing stopping them from selling the *actual* Red Hat, why wouldn't they?
The big problem that Trademarks attempt to address is that of companies actively attempting to deceive the customer as to the source of the product (say, MacMillan may want to undermine Red Hat by selling buggy software that looks like the Red Hat distro). However, this all comes down to people being reliant upon the mapping of Name to Company, something that isn't inherently reliable (there is nothing physically preventing me setting up shop and naming myself Microsoft, so we fabricated legality to prevent it). The basis of Trademark is again unstable, as it's attempting to do something that is fictional. Basically, the Trademark's main purpose is to solve a problem that was created with the Trademark, namely supporting the assumption that there is only one company with a particular name. Again, however, this doesn't *need* to be the case.
Take, for example, the town smithy, named "Bob's Blacksmithing". Now, say another smith moved into town, and was also named Bob, and set up a second shop, also named "Bob's Blacksmithing". There's a conflict. Realistically, both Bob's would recognize that it's in both of their best interests for one of them to choose a name, and it would be courteous for the second Bob to concede. However, this doesn't *need* to be the case. I don't see it as Wrong for the second Bob to use the name -- after all, the name is every bit as legitmate for the first Bob as it is for the second Bob.
Names are fictional things, and duct-tape is required to support the illusion that they're unique. We're really far down the path now, perhaps irrevocably, but we didn't need to take this path. We could've instead say "Well, we recognize that a name isn't a good indicator of who we're dealing with, so let's find a different, more accurate way."
So, assume that in this town they decided to take the second path, where it is perfectly legal for the second Bob's shop to be named the same as the first Bob's. Faced with a conflict, they need to go further, past the fictional name, and find some deeper underlying difference betweeen the two shops, such as the North shop and the South shop, or Old shop and New shop -- objective, unique identifiers. Problem solved, no legal bills for either party.
Now, let's take it further and assume that a thousand Bob's move into town and all make identically named shops. Cardinal directions no longer apply, so identifying a particular shop requires more precision, such as "the shop on 7th and 4th". Again, problem solved, no legal bills.
Names are fictional things, and are in no way guaranteed unique. Assuming that they are unique is foolish, and an unstable basis for a system. Accepting that names are not unique leads to the creation of a stable, more accurate system that is based upon truly unique features, such as physical location, DNS entries, IP addresses, etc.
Don't think it will work? Do you think that it's impossible to differentiate between a thousand identically named and stocked business scattered all throughout town, and that consumers will freak and businesses will ultimately fail because of the resulting confusion? If so, please explain to me the existence of 7-11.
Hm... I see what you're saying, but I think of it in a different way.
.com appended. This is plainly not the case. As more and more companies come online, it will be come more and more unreliable to assume that appending .com to the most commonly used name of a company will work. For examples, try looking up a couple game companies: 'id' that makes Doom/Quake, 'Origin' that makes Ultima/Wing Commander, 'Epic Megagames' that makes Unreal, etc. by using the ".com approach". Then try it using Yahoo. Which is quicker and more reliable?
You seem to be implying that a company could make due with any plot of land equally well, which is never really the case. Every business has geographical needs (warehouses need to be near shipping routes, factories near water for cooling, mining near mineral deposits, resturants near customers, etc). Likewise, the same plot of land may be more or less "intrinsically" valuable to a particular company depending on their needs, regardless of whether or not they own it. So, I may purchase land that I know contains oil deposits, not because I'm interested in drilling for oil, but because I know that others are. Even if this oil field is right next door to Exxon and particularly convenient for them as they could really use it well, it doesn't mean they have implicit rights to it.
DNS entries are exactly the same. Some entries are more valuable than others to a particular company depending on its unique needs. Just because a particular entry would be really convenient for a company because it happens to be somewhat similar to one of their trademarks doesn't mean that they have implicit rights.
Currently people aberrantly believe that the only way that a company can be found is by trying it's company name with a
By assuming that just because the entry happens to correspond to something that looks sorta like a trademark that somebody owns it and that it will get you where you want to go (not to mention those times when "legitmate" conflicts arise when two people have trademarked the same word in different industries), we get a system that can't even in theory work well for a large number of companies.
However, by acknowledging that that just plainly won't work, we can become more reliant upon a system where the mapping from company name to IP is is more accurate (ie, search engines, portals).
As long as society is reliant upon this nonfunctional system for finding the proper website, the System is biased toward the large corporation (again).
1) recognizable DNS entries are finite
2) multiple people have uses for the same DNS entries
3) there is no clearly objective rule that indicates the correct owner
4) subjective answers are never "right" nor "wrong", but merely opinions
5) contests between DNS owners come down to opinion vs opinion
6) the only solutions are for a) one side to concede or for b) the government to make a choice
7) conceding means losing valuable property due to someone else's opinions
8) having the government choose means spending tremendous amounts on legal bills with uncertain results, and in the end possibly losing valuable property due to someone else's opinions
I don't disagree that this will sorta work. I just think that it's highly biased toward the "big" guy with the deep pockets.
You're assuming that the existing system would work entirely unaltered with the concept of Trademarks removed, which I never suggested. I agree that products that rely upon a brand-name to be sold wouldn't fly, and I'm ok with this.
Again, this gets back to the concept of information as property. Coca-Cola didn't invent the flavor "Coke" -- they just happened to find it. Anyone can mix together the same ingredients and create "Coke", but currently we don't allow that because we grant a temporary monopoly over the recipe for and the name of Coke. This I say is silly. It doesn't make sense for one company to have complete control over an idea -- why not have Coca-cola simply be a service provider in that they will create Coke, distribute and sell it, as a service. The product that they create costs basically nothing, but the service they provide in terms of canning and distribution is very valuable. In this way if there is someone closer that makes Coke better (perhaps with higher quality ingredients, for Coke enthusiasts) or fresher or whatever, then they could build a business model on this.
Right now brand name is more important than quality to sell a product, and I see that as a problem. If the strength of a brand name (via the removing of the monopoly power over that word) was diminshed, it would seem that people would need to compete on quality alone.
I see it like the blacksmiths and butchers of yore -- there were probably a thousand differnet shops named "Bob's butchery", but it didn't matter because the name wasn't important, the product was.
I'm not saying that Trademarks should be eliminated right now, I'm merely attempting to illustrate that society would not collapse and would in fact continue to function normally were we to restructure the system such that information would not be treated as proprety.
"But wait," you say, "there are *some* things that we can all agree are bad."
I can assure you, I would never even suggest such a thing. :)
Diversity of the genome is a *good* thing. GEing our children will do nothing to make the genome more diverse, and everything to make it conform to some "ideal" that might not be.
True, but keep in mind that what the "ideal" isn't constant. Currently people dream of being "ideal" because it's unique -- nobody is "ideal". If everyone had (for example -- I'm not sure what your conception of ideal is) blonde hair and blue eyes, then nobody would want them. People don't dream of homoginzation, they dream of distinguishing themselves from the masses in some way. It just turns out that people tend to persue the same paths thinking "I'm at point A, nobody is at point B, I'll go there to be different!" not realizing that everyone else is thinking the same thing.
I'm merely saying that people are inconsistant with the concept of ownership of information, and people like the idea of owning a song, but don't like the idea of owning a DNS entry.
That's assuming that DNS is already part of trademark law, which I don't believe is resolved yet. My current take is that people are in the process of determining whether or not DNS entries are equivelant to product/company names, and what I'm saying is that they're not -- they're merely addresses. Big companies like to push their trademark wherever they can because it gives them ammunition in the courtroom, and they're pushing really hard right now because it's still uncertain. I'm simply pushing back.
Many companies have invested good money giving "meaning" to their trademarks...
While I think that Trademarks are a bad idea all around, I'm not advocating the complete elimination of them right now (although I may later). I'm simply against infecting a new system (DNS) with the Trademark affliction. Trademarks can and will exist just fine even if it's determined that DNS entries are merely street names.
I think you mean "abstract", right?
Hmm.. I think both technically work, but I prefer the implied connotation of "fictional". Abstract implies that it's a correct interpretation viewed from a different perspective, whereas Fictional implies that it's merely one interpretation and it is quite likely out of touch with reality. I'm not saying that the laws are fictional, I'm saying that intellectual property isn't a Real thing -- it has no quantitative, objective and scientific measurement, and hence I say it's fictional. But, this may be merely a semantics issue.
There is nobody out there except a few anarchists and nihilists who don't believe in the principles behind trademark law, and this includes you.
"Never say Never." I do, in fact, disagree with Trademark law, and would prefer that Coke didn't own and couldn't legally control the name Coke. I would prefer that anybody could can and label something as coke (note this doesn't mean that they'd be free from FDA regulation). Companies would still make and can coke, and they'd compete based on the quality of their instantiation of the global concept of what "Coke" tastes like, and all would be dandy. Coke would still be made, and it may not taste the same everywhere, but I'd learn which machine gives me the coke that I like the best and theoretically, due to the competition, quality would go up and prices would come down. In addition, perhaps society would develop in such a fashion that "Tommy Hilfiger", "Coke", "Nike" and other major brand names wouldn't take up such an extreme amount of social energy.
Trademarks are the healthiest form of IP, but I'm not convinced that we couldn't do without it and be better off. Companies like to make money, and one way of doing that is selling products, and selling products requires trust from the consumer, and there are other ways to get trust from the consumer aside from a brand name. Business worked for literally thousands of years without trademark, and we managed to make it here.
Like so many posters are noticing, we give up some freedom when we allow ownership of names; At least let's minimize that by not giving up freedom for nothing.
I agree that at times this is useful. I just don't think that now is one of those times.
Ahh, I think I see what you mean. You're saying that because land property doesn't have a fixed price, it's incomparable to DNS entries. If this is the case, I'd still disagree.
First, land did have a fixed price from the start, and only after people bought up all the land did it start to operate based upon the supply/demand model. We're in the first phase now for the DNS entries -- people are buying up all the land at a cheap fixed price. Once all the land is bought, it will operate according to supply/demand. So, it still appears to me to be a valid analogy.
But it appears that you disagree with this -- what am I missing?
I agree that people like to be rewarded for their effort. I think that there are other methods of reward that make sense and don't require extreme counter-intuitive and fictional concepts of property to get them done. Information in and of itself is worthless: something with infinite supply has no demand, and hence, no value. However, the *creation* of information is valuable, because creation takes time and time is not limitless (well, in terms of a fraction of a lifespan). So, if those that product information charged up front for their effort, they wouldn't need to rely upon some completely arbitrary idea that somehow they own what they invent.
If people really *owned* ideas, should Newton be paid royalties for every time a plane flies, a car moves, and an apple falls? No, that's crazy. He didn't invent the concepts of gravity, he just discovered them.
Likewise, should Shakespeare be paid for every time someone used the theme of two lovers from different tribes? No, he didn't invent that idea, he simply discovered it and publicized it.
Finally, should somebody be paid for every time someone reads a book? No, they didn't invent those words, they merely discovered that arranging them in a certain fashion happens to produce a story.
People don't invent ideas. They discover them.
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue4_6/kelsey/
If X put the sign on Y without owning it, that was their mistake. They took a big risk by investing in Y (by putting their sign upon it and having their customers reliant upon Y having their sign) without owning it.
Squatter Z comes along and buys Acre Y between Company X's headquarters and the nearest highway at $50, before Company X had a chance to.
If they had a chance to put a sign on it and make their business reliant upon it, why didn't they have the chance to buy it before Z came along? This rebuttal seems a bit unrealistic.
I'm not.
Could you give me a rational explanation that is based on something other than "well, it's just Bad" or "I'm jealous that I didn't think of it first"? Likewise "it infringes upon Trademark" assumes that trademarks apply to DNS (and also assumes that Trademarks have a rational basis), and if you belive this, please also explain why I shouldn't be able to start a burger shop on "McDonald's" street, which is essentially exactly the same scenario.
The biggest problem people have with trying to sell information is that there is a limitless supply -- treating it like property just doesn't work (value=demand/supply, supply=infinity, value=0).
However, in the case of DNS entries, it actually *does* work as property (value=demand/supply, supply=some fixed amount, value!=0). The funniest part of this is that people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property!
The whole concept of "squatting" as somehow Bad is very silly. If I "squat" on some land next to a city, someone that wants to build a business on that land must purchase it, even if I just let it sit there "unused" (although waiting for its value to rise is a perfectly legitimate use). This makes perfect sense and is seen as a very reputable trade.
However, in the case of DNS entries, which seems to me to be exactly the same, people don't like this anymore.
The problem isn't with people "squatting" on DNS entries, the problem is that people seem to think that they "own" the name. The idea of owning a name, owning a bit of information, is silly. It's completely fictional and requires extreme duct-tape to make sort of functional. For a long while we could sorta do it because duplication was kinda expensive and not many people wanted to do it so the makeshift legality wasn't too heinous. But those days are over. It never made sense to treat information as property, and now it doesn't even work a little bit.
As long as we have this fictional and totally unnecessary concept of Intellectual Property, there will always be cases like this. People will claim ownership over the technique of storing credit card information on their servers for "1 click" service, for the transfer of music files over the internet, for using the XOR function to blit and remove images to the screen. As long as IP exists, we'll be battered with one after another absurdity.
Intellectual Property was a bad idea to begin with, and it's only getting worse.
True, genetics isn't the sole factor in intelligence. However, your statement applies equally well against GE.
With GE, one can reliably produce an entire race of a type of people, ie. an intellectual race that would have their pleasure center stimulated every time they learn or a worker race that gets their pleasure center stimulated for working and obeying but their pain center stimulated trying to come up with new ideas or learning.
This seems to imply that the government would be deciding who gets what sort of GE, which I wasn't imagining would be the case (although it's not beyond the realm of reason). If that is the case, I agree, we'd be screwed. However, I was thinking that GE would only occur when parents desire the operation upon their children. As such, the scenario wouldn't be the case (unless lots of parents decided to turn their children into worker drones, which perhaps a tax break could encourage...).
EXACTLY, would you like that kind of screening to be extended to every aspect of life? Besides, insurances use statistics which have high uncertainties. But if one was engineered, that uncertainty goes away.
Assuming, of course, that it were completely possible to extrapolate a person's life out of there genes, which isn't the case as environment is a huge factor. However, I agree that genes are a huge factor, and many people may desire to have this information before hiring. But, this is a similar situation to racism, and people are pretty down on that so I doubt they'd be keen on the idea of genetic screening for applicants, and a number of laws would surely develop, just as to protect against racism.
Ah... but they do!! That is what the resume is for. For example, if you left out a year in a resume, employers would ask what you did then (Jail time is often implied).
Um.. I was meaning ancestral information, which is rarely asked for in most situations.
One reason education cannot guarantee results is because you don't know which method of education the child would be receptive to because there can be infinite. If you can control genes, then you control one input, then you can use that control applied to a variety of education method and find the best way. Governments may encourage that as it would produce loyal citizens and make education cheaper.
Again, this is assuming that GE modifications were forced upon people, which I'm hoping wouldn't be the case. However, if this knowledge were known, it would be possible to know the best way to teach people, and education quality would skyrocket.
So, while I agree that things would suck if the Gov were in charge of GE modifying everyone, parents GE modifying children may not have adverse societial effects (any more than existing situations).
First of all, the movie's hero was a "natural" child that showed he was superior to the "engineered" peers. And it never said that the engineered children were any *worse* than the natural ones. So, I'd say that the message isn't so much "Genetic engineering is bad practice", but "Assuming that genetic engineering solves all problems is bad practice."
Most arguments I've heard about this issue come down to two issues: fear and jealousy.
"People will get jealous because they didn't (get the opportunity to) take advantage of GE, and they'll revolt."
How is this any different than people being jealous that they didn't get higher education, or didn't have the wealth to get into a private school? Or, how is this different than countries being jealous that their histories didn't lead them to opulance and instead led them to poverty? This seems to me to be just like any other rich/poor scenario. And this is all perfectly natural. Agreed, it's best to structure things so that an action is persued in such a fashion to avoid conflict, but that doesn't mean that the action can't take place. This could be better phrased "There is danger that such technology could upset people, so care should be taken to avoid conflict, perhaps by offering it to everyone equally."
"A superhuman race will form, and the normals will be inferior."
Again, how is this bad? Those that have (or are perceived to have) better skills will get hired. Should it be any other way? Would you prefer that this "Superhuman" race would develop, and they wouldn't be treated any differently? Also, do you think that this "Superhuman" race hasn't already developed? If you believe in genetics, don't you believe that smart people usually reproduce with smart people, and that this race is already in existence? Likewise, we are already all judged by our ancestry in at least one area: health insurance. If people were truly as obsessed with genetics as Gattaca seemed to imply, people would request personal histories before hiring.
"From birth your destiny will be controlled by your genes."
The point is getting old, but this is already in effect. Your life is a direct result of how you were developed -- if your environment invested in your education, you became successful. If it didn't, you won't. Both your genes and your envirionment are mainly out of your control, and this will be the case with or without genetic engineering.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could actually hurt themselves by doing it."
This is a good cautionary note, but again doesn't mean outright avoidance. If it does indeed turn out that GE actually weakens people (ie, causes degenerative damage, shortens lifespans, etc) then they took a risk that failed, so be it.
"This technology is so poorly understood, they could hurt me by doing it."
And this makes perfect sense. We don't know what kind of crap could happen. We could create some sort of bizarre virus that affects millions, or who knows. This is by far the best argument against it in my book, but sadly rarely comes up.
These are all interesting points, but most could be made about private schools, music tutors, and genetically engineered crops as well. Jealousy that you or your offspring won't be one of the "superior" race just doesn't to me seem a valid argument against something that could very well lead to stepping the net intelligence of humanity up a notch. Likewise fear that something Bad would happen with this technology can be offset by slow and cautious progress. Neither fear nor jealousy are objectively convincing arguments for why it shouldn't be done. And without objective arguments, it will be done. Perhaps not tomorrow, but a genetic superrace will develop in the near future. Perhaps it'll be called "genetic vaccinations" or "mental health augmentations" or whatever, but there will always be people that are exploiting risky and experimental medical treatments to attempt to better there lives. If you don't like it, figure out a way to eliminate the demand, and then the supply won't be an issue. If you can't figure out a way to convince people that they shouldn't want it, perhaps it is you that needs convincing.
Why exactly is squatting bad? People buy property around cities not because they want to develop it, but because they think it will be valuable to other people that may want to develop it. Is this "squatting" as well, and is it bad? If not, how is it different than Domain Names?
It would seem to me that domain names are equivalent to street names: if I open up a hamburger shop on "McDonald's Ave." nobody would ever claim that I am infringing upon somebody's trademark and that I should move my company. However, this is exactly what people are suggesting for domain names. Saying domain names are somehow "rightfully" owned by somebody other than the entity who purchased them is as absurd as saying that McDonalds owns all the property surrounding its resturants, even if it never bothered to purchase it.
Domain names are a limited resource, and hence obey supply and demand.
There are a couple of ways this system could work, the simplest being what we currently have: first come first served. This FCFS system is effectively treating domain names like land property -- whoever owns the land controls how it is used, regardless of whether or not somebody else could use it "better" (a subjective and essentially meaningless term). With this mindset, it is totally absurd to even suggest that somebody else could "claim" a domain that they don't own (minus the government, of course) -- it would be like McDonald's claiming to own the property next to it's resturants, or claiming to own all the land that is on all roads named "McDonald", "McDonald's", "MacDonalds", etc. I understand that it's important for companies to protect their trademarks, but the location of their business (their domanin name is merely a convenient, easy to remember name for their business location -- like saying "the corner of 5th and 7th") is completely unrelated to this.
Now, some may say "But some companies name themselves based upon their location: Amazon.com, EBay.com, etc." This works just fine as long as you own the location -- it would be like me naming my resturant "5th and 7th". However, if I name my business as such *before* purchasing the land, and it turns out that somebody else owns that land, I have no claim upon it.
By saying that companies somehow own all the land associated with their name, it is yet another way that The System is biased toward the large corporations over the small companies. First we must recognize that none of what we talk about is handed to us from God or written in stone -- there are no intrinsic Rights involved. As such, whatever we say you "can" and "cannot" do is purely fictional, and purely up to us to decide. We can decide to create a system that doesn't make any sense and ends up benefiting only those people that can pay enough in legal fees to keep the issue so clouded up that it will never be resolved, or we can choose to make a system that is simple and self regulating. By saying that trademark owners somehow have implicit Rights concerning domain names, we have a system that is chaotic and totally subjective -- there is no objective way to measure who is "right". If, on the other hand, we create system where domain names are owned by a single entity, there is no fuzziness to the issue, and we can objectively ask "Who owns this Domain Name", an it can be resolved without conflict or bias by looking at the deed.
I'd say it all comes down to optimizing costs. Currently, for whatever reason, buggy products still make money.
There's some sort of cost relationship between product stability, feature lists, and usability. Businesses, as in any industry, manage those costs to generate the most revenue in the shortest time and for the smallest investment.
Labeling buggy products as Bad is as meaningless as labeling super-featured products as Good. It's an entirely subjective experience that ultimately is resolved at the cash-register. That which makes the most money at the least risk will always win.
Customers don't realize that short term wins (acquring products quickly and cheaply) have long term consequences (platform stability, overall software quality). Currently customers don't have the skills or experience to work factors into their own cost minimization equations, so they're effectively "weighted" at zero.
As the industry matures people will surely start to pay attention to these things, and businesses will have to account for this to remain profitable.
The big problem is that due to the institutional ignorance of the human population, The Masses are easily manipulated for the profit of The Individual. The current lack of understanding of the customer base has proven to be very profitable, so large corporations find it safer to continue to rely upon (and even take pains to ensure the existance of) this ignorance than to take a risk upon developing good software to satisfy a small (and statistically shrinking?) group of enlightened users.
As long as The System allows The Corporations to manipulate The Masses for their own profit, this will continue to be the case. The goal is for The Masses, and through them, The Government, to recognize that corporations are only *allowed* to exist because they are a tool believed to assist in increasing the standards of living for The Masses. Once this understanding is gained, then The Masses, via The Government can reshape the public tool called the corporation for their own benefit.
Survival of the fittest is something that occurs on a large variety of traits. The most obvious of those are physical strength, reproductive strategy, environmental adaptation, etc. However, I don't see why there isn't a "coolness" trait as well. A T-rex would be evolutionarily superior to some boring dinosaur even though both are extinct exactly because it has a better chance of being resurrected.
Because humans exist as part of nature, anything we do is a completely natural process. In addition, let's define fitness as 'the ability to exploit natural processes for propagating DNA patterns'. This seems to imply that animals that are able to exploit the natural process of the human tendancy to ressurect animals and plants that we see as "cool" would be evolutionary fit.
As such, the cloning of 'extinct' species (which presumably means those species that don't currently have any living representatives) is every bit a legitmate method of DNA propagation as sexual reproduction. Given millions or billions of years of cloning being part of the natural process of DNA propagation, the ability to take advantage of that may be more important to long term survival than any other method. It's theoretically possible that life could develop, or we could develop life that relies completely upon cloning for survival (read: Terminator gene technology).