As much as the slashdot community likes to pick on the "Honorable" Mr. Stevens for the tubes gaffe, you've really got to wonder why this probe didn't begin earlier, when the respectable journalists (i.e. not the Daily Show) regularly refer to this guy as Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens.
If what you say is true, it is a very strange situation. Every NDA I've ever seen has a very well defined.
After the term is up they are no longer bound to maintain confidentiality. This is a very sensibly CYA tactic, since no one wants to keep a record of things we're never allowed to tell anyone.
Couple that with the fact that dealing with a university's legal department is a giant PITA and they are very likely to tell even the likes of Microsoft to take a hike if they can't come to terms, and I can't believe that any university of note has ever agreed to keep the windows source secret forever. Further, I can't believe that microsoft would trust a non-notable university with it's most precious code.
It might be stupid, but for a publicly traded company a share holder is at best only indirectly interested in things like revenue, profits, and market cap.
In other words the only reason that the people controlling the direction of the business will make a change is if they foresee a decrease (or not rapid enough increase) in stock price. The question ultimately isn't will this make us money, the question is will this change cause our perceived value to increase.
The start up example is a bit of a red herring, in that case the market value is related to the speculated future value of the company, current revenue is essentially irrelevant.
Yes, there is an important distinction between share price and revenue, but when the cards are on the table a business acts on the former. Ok, so maybe the business of SONY/BMG isn't losing money, but the owners are - and that is important.
Loosing money == decreasing share price. If the share price decreases the people that own the company are losing money, even if the company is only earning money at a slightly slower rate.
Looking at SONY/BMG is a little tricky because the parent companies do a bit more than music. However, if you look at how EMI has done in the last 5 years (and I'd argue that SONY/BMG has probably performed similarly): http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EMI&t=5y you'll notice that if you owned stock you would have lost money even if revenues have always been positive.
I think this is awesome too, but for a different reason. Discovery. The first thing the defendants are going to want to do is show that they SONY actually does understand the concept of DRM and how difficult it is to do effectively, and secondly SONY did understand what they were asking for.
Of course it'll probably look more like this $sysDiscovery
Is anyone laboring under the impression that e-petitions do anything?
I think it is hard to make a case that the standard paper petitions are effective, but it at least shows that the organizer is dedicated to the cause, and probably some respectable percentage of the signatories at least agree a little.
With an e-petition, the organizer spends what, all of 15 minutes working on a petition, and who are the signatories? Are they even citizens, are they the same guy 30,000 times?
I will never sign an e-petition. I may even start an e-petition to make my case to all those e-petition zealots that me, and probably a few dozen other people wont' stand for more e-petitions. We'll go so far as to enter our email addresses on a web form to show our solidarity. But then again it might just be too much work.
Finally, why in the world would I trust the organizer of an e-petition with any information about my self? Seems like a great way to harvest spammable information. If I don't have to enter any information, how do you know I'm a real person?
No we don't want having an office to be a requirement for everything, but having a location licenced to use nuclear materials isn't unduly burdensome for ordering nuclear materials.
I'm not one to freak out at the mention of the N-word (no not that one, the one they rhymes with heckler) but there is a pretty good reason for the NIOSH (I think that's the regulatory agency anyway) standards for handling nuclear material. I think it stands to reason that if you don't have a facility licensed to use, store, or transport nuclear materials, you probably shouldn't be ordering them.
However, FTFA:
But he said the danger associated with the amount of radioactive material the auditors were trying to buy should not be overstated. And the operation would have been much more expensive and complicated than pulling off a more conventional attack involving a truck bomb or a chemical tanker truck.
"Why would I not blow up a chemical tanker on a train with chlorine in it or other toxic materials, at a tiny fraction of the cost before doing this very elaborate exercise?" Mr. McGaffigan said.
So basically, it isn't even economic impact we're worrying about here, it's public reaction when the 11 o'clock news reports DIRTY BOMB EXPLODES IN SHOPPING MALL <small>one killed by explosion, no other serious injuries, no long term health risks, no structural damage, mall to reopen tomorrow</small>
Perhaps we should be educating the public rather than fear-mongering that, OMFG anyone can buy industrial equipment with small amounts of Am-241. Next think you know we're going to be hearing the breaking news that ordinary rocks in the ground contain radioactive material - all a Terrorist has to do is dig them up, crush them, refine them, set up an extraction facility, and run this process for only ~5 years with out anyone noticing, then then all they'd have to do is discover an effective dispersal mechanism and thousands could receive low level radiation poisoning.
Your right, it would have been freaking hilarious. I'd buy a ticket, if someone could arrange something like this.
The downside is that it would foster some pretty substantial ill will in those most likely to extol the virtues of your product. Not the best way to get "grassroots" support - which seems to be what is driving apple these days.
Actually I specifically avoided saying that the MIT guys aren't that reckless or irresponsible specifically because it is a huge assumption.
What is not a huge assumption is that they aren't stupid enough to design a virus that can exploit a common vector in both bacterial and mammalian cells. The point of my original post is that there are huge, massive, and easily exploitable differences between bacterial and mammalian cells. Worrying that a virus that targets a plasmid will mutate to be able to target human cells is like worrying that a baleen whale will mutate to be able to prey on surfers.
You do realize that privacy is only relevant in very large societies, i.e. the kind that's only existed in a few other places for ~4000 years, and the kind that has only become ubiquitous in the last ~300 years. In short very few people have cared about privacy for the vast majority of human development.
Thats not to say privacy is a bad thing (I'd argue it's neutral) but human nature worked just fine when your whole village new your business, I doubt our social structures will collapse because we now have several orders of magnitude more villagers.
Basically, we'll deal with the shift in private/public just like we've dealt with every other social change that has ever come our way. Maybe common sense will even play a role, and we won't abandon a potential political candidate for something stupid he posted on myspace 20 years ago at 3:00 am after his last final of the semester.
There was a similar situation last year, when Tom Petty was considering legal action against the Red Hot Chili Peppers because the riff in Dani California was strangely similar to the riff in Mary Jane's Last Dance.
I didn't really follow the story (wikipedia says Tom Petty denied considering legal action) but my local radio station played a third song, by a band Petty supposedly toured with (who's name I can't remember) that sounded a lot more similar to Mary Jane's Last Dance than Dani California did to either.
There are all kinds of bad things open to attack regarding Big Pharma's business models. You seem to have chosen very poorly.
Lack of profit would cripple new drug research. Sure, pharma gets a lot of its actives from academia, but have you considered how many of those leads turn out to be flops? Buying a compound from a university lab that turns out to be worthless (which is something like 995 out of a thousand) is a large money sink. Then when you have something good there is testing to be done. Lots and lots of testing. Testing the university pharmaceutical department didn't do. The really, really expensive kinds of tests. This is the single biggest cost to pharma. Then even after they've tested the crap out of the drug, they have to get regulatory approval, and the FDA is possibly the least efficient of all government agencies.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but do you really want to wait until we really need a Bird Flu vaccine to get to the invention part? Did I mention there is something like a 7-10 year wait between discovery and commercialization? I'd prefer we not rely on necessity in medicine.
If you want to go after big pharma start by attacking their largest budget, which would be advertising, and leave their second largest budget (R&D) alone. Then talk about the positively unhealthy relationships between pharma and health insurance. Then you can point to the shameful mark up on some very necessary medicines, recognizing that 60% of American's who really need the drug will be just fine, insurance will cover it. Besides, the money saved by decimating the advertising budget should allow the cost to come down, but if not, then you can go after the horrible inefficiency of their manufacturing line - seriously, batch processes in a chemical industry? who does that?
In summary, when attacking big pharma go after the guys in the corner offices, not the guys in the lab.
There was a cover story in USAToday about this about a month ago (hey, I was in a hotel room, stop judging me.) The main focus was the massive slide that rap has undergone in the last three years. I particularly liked the comparison that in 2003 the best selling album was The Eminem Show, and in 2006 it was The High School Musical soundtrack.
Their analysis was that one of several problems that loomed large was that rap is a very single driven genre, and people simply don't have to buy albums anymore. (The other major problem was that rap had lost all credibility with pretty much everybody.)
've seen lines at the grocery store across the street selling their gas for 3 cents cheaper. You save less than a dollar on a tank of gas. And they grab a 16oz Coke on the way out for $1.29
Which is precisely why stations with large shops have the cheapest gas. The margins on gas are razor thin, and most stations make their only real profit in the convenience stores. Some stations even price the gas as a loss-leader to get people into their store. (Which is also why I never buy anything at a gas station, unless I absolutely have to - like if I'm on the turnpike).
This phenomenon, got me thinking, on the east coast, many states only sell beer in liquor stores, whereas in the midwest damn near every store has a license to sell beer. I wonder how much we could decrease the cost of gas on the east coast simply by offering beer/wine liquor licenses to gas stations. In the end it is probably revenue neutral, but some politician could claim that he reduced gas prices a couple of cents.
In some intro engineering class, the professor asked a question to get us to think about the implications of selecting a unit system. The question was: "Crude and Gasoline are sold on a volume bases (gallon/liter/barrel). If gasoline is refined in Louisiana, and shipped to Michigan does who pays for the missing gasoline (and what are they buying)? Is the sale completed on an "as delivered basis", or an "as shipped" basis?
Of course the answer is that the consumer pays regardless, but it raises some interesting accounting issues...
Right, so you're not completely SOL, but you're not getting your ring back, and you have no case against the third party purchaser. Sorry, I didn't thoroughly think through that post.
Yes, but if I sell your ring, which obviously would make me unable to return it, then you can sue me for its value. It is my understanding, (and again I could be wrong) that the person who bought the ring owns it free and clear. I can't repossess it, and you can't (legally) try to recover it by reporting it stolen.
Media Sentry is like me in this situation, they didn't behave appropriately with the material they were entrusted with, so the MPAA can sue them. However, since they were in fact entrusted with the material, the people who obtained it through them have legitimate (if unauthorized) copies and are in the clear.
As much as I appreciate the funny mod, I was making a serious point here. There has never been a free information utopia. Information is hoarded, especially when it confers an advantage to one group. Whether it be stone cutting, iron (or steel) smelting, beer recipes, gunpowder, power looms, steam engines, hardware architecture, or software, those who gain a political, military, or economic advantage from the technology are very reticent to share.
It just so happens that the industrial revolution made us much better at deciphering other's secrets. It is no coincidence then that the birth of IP law happened around the same time.
So your telling me that if I say, "Here have this ring, and take care of it, but I'm probably going to want it back at some point," but you turn around and sell it, it is theft? Now I know the law isn't always intuitive, and I could be wrong, but if I loan something to you, and you sell it, I think I'm SOL (and next time I won't trust you with my things.)
I seem to be missing my "invoice, or an account which clearly maps an individual to a copyrighted work" for every CD I've ever bought. Sure I was issued a receipt, but there was no mention of copyright (let alone a clear indication of the copyright holder) in any of that. Copyright exists (at least in the US) without requiring any action on the part of the copyright holder. I hold the copyright on my slashdot posts for instance.
If I have an agent who squirrels away copies of my material, I can go after that agent, but I can't do anything about the copies in the wild, as those copies were authorized by my agent, and therefore ostensibly by me. Downloading a copyrighted work from a website is illegal, unless the website belongs to the studio, the MPAA, or an agent of either.
In my CD example, I wasn't very clear. What I meant was the artist is selling CDs from his car, that were his creation, whether live tracks, remixed stuff, or something other than a label sanctioned and factory produced CD. He isn't allowed to produce or distribute them as per his contract since he signed away the copyright. The label can go after the artist, but not the guy who bought the CD, since he bought a CD from an agent of the label.
You don't have to be all that skilled to make something dangerous. You only have to be slightly skilled to make something that is dangerous when you want it to be, but safe the rest of the time. The chemistry involved in making speed is more difficult, yet plenty of junkies are making it in their bathtubs - most don't even blow themselves up.
The only hard part about any of this is procuring the raw materials, depending on the desired final product all of which might be legal to own (separately) in small quantities.
When I saw fireworks last night, I went with a ChemE friend of mine who works part time seasonally for the fireworks company shooting the show. He was bemoaning the tighter regulations post 9/11 around explosives. He got into chemistry by making a few small fireworks in his parent's basement, but is now not willing to risk a raid on his own house to mess around with things he is well trained to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as the slashdot community likes to pick on the "Honorable" Mr. Stevens for the tubes gaffe, you've really got to wonder why this probe didn't begin earlier, when the respectable journalists (i.e. not the Daily Show) regularly refer to this guy as Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens.
Colour me surprised. I can't imagine thier was a time when English spelling was less consistent or standardized. It boggles the mind, thru and thru.
If what you say is true, it is a very strange situation. Every NDA I've ever seen has a very well defined.
After the term is up they are no longer bound to maintain confidentiality. This is a very sensibly CYA tactic, since no one wants to keep a record of things we're never allowed to tell anyone.
Couple that with the fact that dealing with a university's legal department is a giant PITA and they are very likely to tell even the likes of Microsoft to take a hike if they can't come to terms, and I can't believe that any university of note has ever agreed to keep the windows source secret forever. Further, I can't believe that microsoft would trust a non-notable university with it's most precious code.
It might be stupid, but for a publicly traded company a share holder is at best only indirectly interested in things like revenue, profits, and market cap.
In other words the only reason that the people controlling the direction of the business will make a change is if they foresee a decrease (or not rapid enough increase) in stock price. The question ultimately isn't will this make us money, the question is will this change cause our perceived value to increase.
The start up example is a bit of a red herring, in that case the market value is related to the speculated future value of the company, current revenue is essentially irrelevant.
Yes, there is an important distinction between share price and revenue, but when the cards are on the table a business acts on the former. Ok, so maybe the business of SONY/BMG isn't losing money, but the owners are - and that is important.
Loosing money == decreasing share price. If the share price decreases the people that own the company are losing money, even if the company is only earning money at a slightly slower rate.
Looking at SONY/BMG is a little tricky because the parent companies do a bit more than music. However, if you look at how EMI has done in the last 5 years (and I'd argue that SONY/BMG has probably performed similarly): http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EMI&t=5y you'll notice that if you owned stock you would have lost money even if revenues have always been positive.
I think this is awesome too, but for a different reason. Discovery. The first thing the defendants are going to want to do is show that they SONY actually does understand the concept of DRM and how difficult it is to do effectively, and secondly SONY did understand what they were asking for.
Of course it'll probably look more like this $sysDiscovery
Is anyone laboring under the impression that e-petitions do anything?
I think it is hard to make a case that the standard paper petitions are effective, but it at least shows that the organizer is dedicated to the cause, and probably some respectable percentage of the signatories at least agree a little.
With an e-petition, the organizer spends what, all of 15 minutes working on a petition, and who are the signatories? Are they even citizens, are they the same guy 30,000 times?
I will never sign an e-petition. I may even start an e-petition to make my case to all those e-petition zealots that me, and probably a few dozen other people wont' stand for more e-petitions. We'll go so far as to enter our email addresses on a web form to show our solidarity. But then again it might just be too much work.
Finally, why in the world would I trust the organizer of an e-petition with any information about my self? Seems like a great way to harvest spammable information. If I don't have to enter any information, how do you know I'm a real person?
I'm not one to freak out at the mention of the N-word (no not that one, the one they rhymes with heckler) but there is a pretty good reason for the NIOSH (I think that's the regulatory agency anyway) standards for handling nuclear material. I think it stands to reason that if you don't have a facility licensed to use, store, or transport nuclear materials, you probably shouldn't be ordering them.
However, FTFA: So basically, it isn't even economic impact we're worrying about here, it's public reaction when the 11 o'clock news reports DIRTY BOMB EXPLODES IN SHOPPING MALL <small>one killed by explosion, no other serious injuries, no long term health risks, no structural damage, mall to reopen tomorrow</small>
Perhaps we should be educating the public rather than fear-mongering that, OMFG anyone can buy industrial equipment with small amounts of Am-241. Next think you know we're going to be hearing the breaking news that ordinary rocks in the ground contain radioactive material - all a Terrorist has to do is dig them up, crush them, refine them, set up an extraction facility, and run this process for only ~5 years with out anyone noticing, then then all they'd have to do is discover an effective dispersal mechanism and thousands could receive low level radiation poisoning.
Your right, it would have been freaking hilarious. I'd buy a ticket, if someone could arrange something like this.
The downside is that it would foster some pretty substantial ill will in those most likely to extol the virtues of your product. Not the best way to get "grassroots" support - which seems to be what is driving apple these days.
Oh my god, why would anyone record all their meetings (even on a single topic) to a single file.
But then again, there may be no other way to be as certain no one will ever refer to the meeting minutes.
Actually I specifically avoided saying that the MIT guys aren't that reckless or irresponsible specifically because it is a huge assumption.
What is not a huge assumption is that they aren't stupid enough to design a virus that can exploit a common vector in both bacterial and mammalian cells. The point of my original post is that there are huge, massive, and easily exploitable differences between bacterial and mammalian cells. Worrying that a virus that targets a plasmid will mutate to be able to target human cells is like worrying that a baleen whale will mutate to be able to prey on surfers.
The fact that the people at MIT aren't idiots and can design a virus that targets bacteria, and not the massively different mammalian cells?
You do realize that privacy is only relevant in very large societies, i.e. the kind that's only existed in a few other places for ~4000 years, and the kind that has only become ubiquitous in the last ~300 years. In short very few people have cared about privacy for the vast majority of human development.
Thats not to say privacy is a bad thing (I'd argue it's neutral) but human nature worked just fine when your whole village new your business, I doubt our social structures will collapse because we now have several orders of magnitude more villagers.
Basically, we'll deal with the shift in private/public just like we've dealt with every other social change that has ever come our way. Maybe common sense will even play a role, and we won't abandon a potential political candidate for something stupid he posted on myspace 20 years ago at 3:00 am after his last final of the semester.
There was a similar situation last year, when Tom Petty was considering legal action against the Red Hot Chili Peppers because the riff in Dani California was strangely similar to the riff in Mary Jane's Last Dance.
I didn't really follow the story (wikipedia says Tom Petty denied considering legal action) but my local radio station played a third song, by a band Petty supposedly toured with (who's name I can't remember) that sounded a lot more similar to Mary Jane's Last Dance than Dani California did to either.
There are all kinds of bad things open to attack regarding Big Pharma's business models. You seem to have chosen very poorly.
Lack of profit would cripple new drug research. Sure, pharma gets a lot of its actives from academia, but have you considered how many of those leads turn out to be flops? Buying a compound from a university lab that turns out to be worthless (which is something like 995 out of a thousand) is a large money sink. Then when you have something good there is testing to be done. Lots and lots of testing. Testing the university pharmaceutical department didn't do. The really, really expensive kinds of tests. This is the single biggest cost to pharma. Then even after they've tested the crap out of the drug, they have to get regulatory approval, and the FDA is possibly the least efficient of all government agencies.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but do you really want to wait until we really need a Bird Flu vaccine to get to the invention part? Did I mention there is something like a 7-10 year wait between discovery and commercialization? I'd prefer we not rely on necessity in medicine.
If you want to go after big pharma start by attacking their largest budget, which would be advertising, and leave their second largest budget (R&D) alone. Then talk about the positively unhealthy relationships between pharma and health insurance. Then you can point to the shameful mark up on some very necessary medicines, recognizing that 60% of American's who really need the drug will be just fine, insurance will cover it. Besides, the money saved by decimating the advertising budget should allow the cost to come down, but if not, then you can go after the horrible inefficiency of their manufacturing line - seriously, batch processes in a chemical industry? who does that?
In summary, when attacking big pharma go after the guys in the corner offices, not the guys in the lab.
There was a cover story in USAToday about this about a month ago (hey, I was in a hotel room, stop judging me.) The main focus was the massive slide that rap has undergone in the last three years. I particularly liked the comparison that in 2003 the best selling album was The Eminem Show, and in 2006 it was The High School Musical soundtrack.
Their analysis was that one of several problems that loomed large was that rap is a very single driven genre, and people simply don't have to buy albums anymore. (The other major problem was that rap had lost all credibility with pretty much everybody.)
Which is precisely why stations with large shops have the cheapest gas. The margins on gas are razor thin, and most stations make their only real profit in the convenience stores. Some stations even price the gas as a loss-leader to get people into their store. (Which is also why I never buy anything at a gas station, unless I absolutely have to - like if I'm on the turnpike).
This phenomenon, got me thinking, on the east coast, many states only sell beer in liquor stores, whereas in the midwest damn near every store has a license to sell beer. I wonder how much we could decrease the cost of gas on the east coast simply by offering beer/wine liquor licenses to gas stations. In the end it is probably revenue neutral, but some politician could claim that he reduced gas prices a couple of cents.
In some intro engineering class, the professor asked a question to get us to think about the implications of selecting a unit system. The question was: "Crude and Gasoline are sold on a volume bases (gallon/liter/barrel). If gasoline is refined in Louisiana, and shipped to Michigan does who pays for the missing gasoline (and what are they buying)? Is the sale completed on an "as delivered basis", or an "as shipped" basis?
Of course the answer is that the consumer pays regardless, but it raises some interesting accounting issues...
First, your explanation doesn't cover how this device is related to the iPhone.
Second, so, does each phone act as a node or what?
Third, this might be the most redundant slashdot discussion I've ever seen, and I'm feeling the need to snarkily contribute.
Right, so you're not completely SOL, but you're not getting your ring back, and you have no case against the third party purchaser. Sorry, I didn't thoroughly think through that post.
Yes, but if I sell your ring, which obviously would make me unable to return it, then you can sue me for its value. It is my understanding, (and again I could be wrong) that the person who bought the ring owns it free and clear. I can't repossess it, and you can't (legally) try to recover it by reporting it stolen.
Media Sentry is like me in this situation, they didn't behave appropriately with the material they were entrusted with, so the MPAA can sue them. However, since they were in fact entrusted with the material, the people who obtained it through them have legitimate (if unauthorized) copies and are in the clear.
As much as I appreciate the funny mod, I was making a serious point here. There has never been a free information utopia. Information is hoarded, especially when it confers an advantage to one group. Whether it be stone cutting, iron (or steel) smelting, beer recipes, gunpowder, power looms, steam engines, hardware architecture, or software, those who gain a political, military, or economic advantage from the technology are very reticent to share.
It just so happens that the industrial revolution made us much better at deciphering other's secrets. It is no coincidence then that the birth of IP law happened around the same time.
So your telling me that if I say, "Here have this ring, and take care of it, but I'm probably going to want it back at some point," but you turn around and sell it, it is theft? Now I know the law isn't always intuitive, and I could be wrong, but if I loan something to you, and you sell it, I think I'm SOL (and next time I won't trust you with my things.)
I seem to be missing my "invoice, or an account which clearly maps an individual to a copyrighted work" for every CD I've ever bought. Sure I was issued a receipt, but there was no mention of copyright (let alone a clear indication of the copyright holder) in any of that. Copyright exists (at least in the US) without requiring any action on the part of the copyright holder. I hold the copyright on my slashdot posts for instance.
If I have an agent who squirrels away copies of my material, I can go after that agent, but I can't do anything about the copies in the wild, as those copies were authorized by my agent, and therefore ostensibly by me. Downloading a copyrighted work from a website is illegal, unless the website belongs to the studio, the MPAA, or an agent of either.
In my CD example, I wasn't very clear. What I meant was the artist is selling CDs from his car, that were his creation, whether live tracks, remixed stuff, or something other than a label sanctioned and factory produced CD. He isn't allowed to produce or distribute them as per his contract since he signed away the copyright. The label can go after the artist, but not the guy who bought the CD, since he bought a CD from an agent of the label.
When did dynamical become a cromulent word, and who decided that systems was too good a noun to be modified by an adjective like everyone else?
You don't have to be all that skilled to make something dangerous. You only have to be slightly skilled to make something that is dangerous when you want it to be, but safe the rest of the time. The chemistry involved in making speed is more difficult, yet plenty of junkies are making it in their bathtubs - most don't even blow themselves up.
The only hard part about any of this is procuring the raw materials, depending on the desired final product all of which might be legal to own (separately) in small quantities.
When I saw fireworks last night, I went with a ChemE friend of mine who works part time seasonally for the fireworks company shooting the show. He was bemoaning the tighter regulations post 9/11 around explosives. He got into chemistry by making a few small fireworks in his parent's basement, but is now not willing to risk a raid on his own house to mess around with things he is well trained to handle.