The legislation will never be passed as it sets out to create "extensions to the prohibitions on the spread of false information".
REPUBLICANS WILL NEVER STAND FOR THIS.
It would put FOX News Out of Business
The answer to this is not attempting to modify MSNBC's behavior from being yet another corporation that only thinks of profits, which is of course probably true, but rather simply to make it clear that you will not vote for anyone who would willingly allow the American political discourse to be "owned" by anyone. Require that your candidates will only receive your votes if they do not participate in an event in which the "message" is controlled. Make the candidates complicity in rigged events an issue. Another approach is to test the boundaries of exactly what it is MSNBC paid for to permit them to claim that "other sources" (presumably video) at the event can be used. Did they pay the University for exclusive use of the hall? Did the administrator actually have the rights to grant exclusive access on state property, etc? Let MSNBC tarnish its public image (if that is possible) by going after you in court. Investigate and expose the complicity; enlighten your fellow citizens.
Better yet start a grass roots video campaign to cover the candidates independent of corporate media that can appear on YouTube or other such alternative media (as I recall someone had a Makaka moment over this kind of coverage) and put control back into the hands of the American people (although don't jump to the conclusion they would be wise enough to know what to do with it eg. "Mistakes were made!" [picture Bush voters with heads bowed in shame here]). It might just displace "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars" for public attention. You could even restrict rights by corporations to the material without payment for use that could be used to support the effort.
The general topic is worthy of discussion. Just how far are candidates willing to go to prostrate themselves before the media overlords? Just how far will the overall media circus atmosphere evolve toward full media ownership as Ruppert Murdoch proposed.
Compared to the "Dog ate My Homework Routine" we're now getting from the White House, Wikipedia just got its credibility moded up.
By this standard, the students will have to have the White House website blocked as well. Its simply not fact based and the last thing we should be doing to further damage the already declining morals of American youth would be to expose them to the immorality of this presidency. Especially, since today the White House announced that POTUS has made it official. He is now on record as supporting the World Bank president's right to get blowjobs at taxpayers expense. I had thought that kind of moral failing went out with the Clinton years.
I'm shocked just the quickly right wing nuts on the wheels of state have lost their bearings. No wonder the Repooplican party is in such disarray. One has to ask just how long they will continue to engage in this kind of facistic behavior just to continue to provide cover.
If you believe the emails were lost, then I have the scent of some dog poop I'd like to sell you. Its all part of my effort to raise funds on behalf of the NEW REPUBLICAN VALUES!
Nempimania is strictly for Japanese. US drivers simply don't have the culture, patience, stamina, and long-term stick-to-it-ness to get these kinds of mpg over long term useage. US drivers think they get bragging rights by increasing tire sizes, driving Humvee's, out accelerating the next guy, and paying extra for high-octane fuel. In the US status = consumption. The higher your consumption the greater your status.
In the US, bragging rights might more likely go to the guy who says he gets 150 mpg in his OldMobile convertible and can make everyone believe he does, even though he really gets 15. In the US perception trumps reality when it comes to status.
Ask this question in the Muslim world and the frequency of "believers" is likely to be even higher.
Perhaps its so widespread because the religious among us are very good and very busy at persecuting non-believers in one manner or another.
There need not be a gene to explain it, only a propensity to believe in "safe" ideas. Believing in god(s) is sort of like believing in the power of money. I would venture the percentage of people who recognize the importance of money is even higher than the percentage that believe in god(s). Does anyone seem to be suggesting that the belief in the value for money is also genetically based?
Its also likely that even though many are eager to express their "personal relatioship" with God, far fewer would be willing to admit that God, being busy with important things, has absolutely no interest in them and couldn't care less about them because they are simply far too insignificant for "God" to bother taking the time out of her busy schedule to "presonally contact" them. Now who is going to admit to that? Is there a gene for this type of avoidance behavior as well?
One tries to place oneself in situations that are regarded as "safe". Such behaviors will be selected for if over time, they do in fact place people in "safer" situations and these people on average have more offspring. The choices or the bases for these choices do not need to be rational to respond to selection, nor do they need to remain constant throughout human history. At the height of the "Golden Age" in Greece, it was accepted among some circles that the earth rotated about the sun. During later less enlightened times, such ideas were distinctly hazardous to one's health because of religious persecution (eg. death of Giordano Bruno). Selection against those believing in heliocentric theories is now less severe (thank goodness, considering that modern science clearly demonstrates that the earth does indeed orbit the sun).
Many avoidance behaviors may have evolved because they are not rational, since rationality would require people to be aware of them and their awareness may in and of itself be more likely to either confuse or make the "true motives" known to one's adversaries/competitors. For some, their thinking processes may be too slow so its better if they act without thinking, and so long as they on average make the "safe" choice, they will not be at a competitive disadvantage.
"... while some random company that adds nothing of value is"
Publishing books can hardly be seen as not adding value. Could you imagine how combersome and unworkable a system there would be if everyone just printed out or photocopied raw manuscripts? Plagarism would be rampant and citation would be next to impossible. Also publishing houses provide distribution, and often are the only outlets for many obscure works and often manage storage of unpurched volumes yet to be sold.
Can web-based systems work? Yes, they probably could but there needs to be a lot of infrastructure in place before it will replace published works. Take for example, hosting? How would this be paid for. Should we require that webhosts agree to permanent, indefinte long term storage for all time? Who will upgrade the media? Paper, degrades far more slowly than electronic media. How about security issues, these are greater for electronic media as the potential to "deface" previously published text is greater and more available to crackers and other miscreants. What about citation? Which website should be cited? What about date of publication, etc.? These are not insignificant issues. I for one, would be lothe to have a government system so centrally organized that some future politicans can begin to restrict or destroy what can or has been published, simply because they find it expedient to do so.
Yes, I believe that in the long run we should be moving to freely available web-based publication for research articles, but to think that it scientific publication is just as simple as posting HTML to a webpage, is a gross oversimplification of the scientiric publication process. Likewise, it counter productive to destroy the business of scientific publication houses, without consideration of the attendant loss of expertise, talent, and resources, without providing a beneficial and well-reasoned pathway for all parties, often quite well-meaning even if money-making enterprises. The entire move will require careful deliberation and quite possibly lare expenditures to complete, even though they will hopefully save money in the long run and make scientific works more accessible.
This is hardly likely, except in a miniscule fraction of research libraries. Although there are reams of papers whose finding are essentially worthless, often what is worthless to one investigator is often of value to another. This is the case because research papers seldom contain a single relevant "finding". Often papes contain important and valuable data, but the interpretations or methods used to analyze it are faulty or poorly chosen.
A much, much bigger problem is that the average Joe has no interest in reading ANY technical publications (on line or otherwise) and for many who try they really don't have a clue as to what it means. Just look at how the science of climate change is covered in the news and in print. The entire science is predicated largely on the solution of differential equations and numerical analysis. Just how many readers are really in a position to read and properly interpret such results? The percentage is extremely small.
I have published "obscure papers" myself. I would love it if they were more widely available, read, and appreciated, but regardless of whether people would find them "useless" or "valuable" it seems unlikely that these will be even read, except by a few experts.
Perhaps, it is that you haven't made yourself clear and I have misunderstood what it is you are saying. You seem to be suggesting that use of the term "evolution" is inappropriate and there is a more appropriate word to describe the process discussed in the article. I could only conclude that you were suggesting that some other mechanism was involved.
I still fail to see what specific word you would substitute for evolution to talk about changes in gene frequency that would result in a change in microbial resistance?
You keep asserting that there is a more appropriate term, but what term would it be?
I find it difficult to understand how the word you want to use is both (generally) more specific. I admit that there may in fact that there may be multiple evolutionary mechanisms that one could discuss, although ultimately there would be one genetic expression (genetic combination) of the typically four bases over the relevant region of the DNA/RNA and a spectrum of selective regimes depending upon the specific mechanisms of selection operating on the particlar combination being expressed as the phenotype. I think one would need to call it evolution and then speak of the subcomponent or subgroup of evolutionary processes that might best fit the particular circumstance. In my mind it would be inappropriate to choose a term that does not describe the general set of potential descriptors, to all of which evolution would apply. To me that was the point of the article. It demonstrated that biomedical papers were being written using general terms that were overgeneralized to the point that the use of the term was most inappropriately not appearing in discussion of the causal mechanisms at all.
Yes, one certainly could overgeneralize, but then the "telescopic view" would be to at least some degree incorrect and inaccurate and could lead the reader to misunderstand the actual processes involved, perhaps even concluding that evolution has not occurred, when in fact it has. I think that is the point the author was trying to convey. Hence, I read your comments as missing the point of the article. If I understand your current comment, it is that the word you seek is actually and adjective that could be used that provides a greater clarification and refinement of what specific type of evolutionary mechnism is being discussed (ie "saltational evolution" or "gradual evolution" etc.).
Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but I live in a state where there are active efforts to ban science from Biology classroom and, as a scientist, am very concerned over this regressive and appaling trend. The price of freedom to do science and use reason, comes at a cost of constant vigilence.
You hit this nail right on the head. Its just a shame that nails have more sense than the apostles of anti-evolution.
They do not to respond to reason. Thus, I always like to point out that because science does permit reality to be objectively assessed. Hence, it allows us to understand how the natural world is organized and how evolution has actually worked to produce all the life around us. Fro them to prove this to themselves, they can easily conduct an experiment. The experiment will prove to them that if God did create life on earth, then he used evolution to do it.
The experimeent is fairly simple. Let them place their right hand on a Bible and then swear that they will not bear false witness under penalty of eternal damnation to what they see during the course of the experiment. With their left hand, let them hold up a high resolution color picture of chimpanzee as they stand in front of a mirror, positioned so that they can observe both their own reflection and that in the photograph of the chimp. It is easy to use science (reason) to demonstrate that both are 99% identical at the genomic level and that all known fossil and physical evidence establishes that the common ancestor of both images in the mirror diverged between 4.5 - 7 million years ago. Now let them deny before their own God that is no similarity and let them disagree with God as to the evolutionary source of that similarity.
I like to smile when I think about the fact henceforth, they they are destined to live a life trapped by the contradictions of their own righteousness and stupidity. Although one might at first feel the inclination to feel sorry for them, it would be entirely inappropriate to extend pitty. Their's is a fate they deserve.
A fair point. To really get a handle on the consequence of evolution one really needs knowledge of both the genetic mechanism (specifically its state and mode of self-assembly) and the nature of the selective regime (just exactly what selective mechanism has caused (or is causing) the evolution to have occurred (continue to occur if directed). Asteroid impacts, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other large scale phenomena extreme selective regimes are likely to be too infrequent and when they do occur result in nearly complete local extinct to permit much hereditable change, relative to the great many of life's events, each sometimes seemingly mundane, but occurring so repeatedly over the life of an organism that the selection is very "fine tuned". It is not surprising that Darwin was drawn to sexual selection in studying evolution, because of its uquiquity, its regularity, and its very large phenotypic effects. Those seeking to find how animals "predict" eatherquakes have, not surprisingly, been generally disappointed to discover that there is very little evidence, if any to suggest than ANY organism can actually do so.
The future of evolutionary research will continue to be directed toward understanding the repeated regularity within the genome, especially where this regularity results from genetic similarity across organisms that share a relatively close common ancestry. The HOX gene story is probably a good example of how a better understanding of molecular events associated with specific genetic configurations are related to larger phenotypic expression and hence evolution in body plan in vertebrates. However, Pauling's discovery of the difference of a single amino acid substitution in Hemoglobin is responsible for sickle-cell trait (and as subsquently shown related to malarial resistance) demonstates that a seemingly insignificant amount of genomic change (one or a few base pairs at a wobble position) can have a profound effect on the surviability of the phenotype and on evolution in humans.
If one models evolutionary change as a Markovian process, the latter makes clear that there the values of elements of transition matrices that can be extremely unstable, and that at the mappings between genotype and phenotype can be highly ill-conditioned. Nonetheless, even though much of evolution may take place "at the edge of chaos", this does not mean that the mechanisms involved are either haphazard or truly chaotic. In any event it is certain that they are not due to "intelligent design", since they are so demonstrably directed and often redirected by changes in the selective regime. This has been conclusively demonstrated in the ecent work of Peter Grant on evolution in Darwin's finches. Grant and coworkers clearly show that beak dimensions are selected from year to year, largely as a result of rainfall patterns and differential seed availability, moving back and forth in a clearly channeled directions, but without any particular stable direction (toward any particular "more intelligent design") aside from that imposed on the system by a limited number of parameters in the environment.
If microbial existence exists it is due to changes in its genome. The important scientific question relate to what specific changes have occurred and to what extent have such changes affected microbial resistance. Unless you are attempting to argue that there are other kinds of "objects" other than the well known (typically 4) purine or pyrimidine bases that constitute the "genetic alphabet" your arguments are of dubius scientific utility.
The grammar of the language you use to describe these "physical" objects is irrelevant. One could use English, Russian, or Japanese, all of which have different grammars and "objects" in this sense. However, whatever the grammar of the language you chose to make the description, the measurable correlations between a specific level of resistance that results from a specific genome will be the same.
Sophistry is an ancient artform, but its lack of value in scientirfic discussions greatly limits its usefulness. Such arguments are better suited to discussions of religion. Rather than being specific and accurate, you have managed to miss the point of the original article entirely.
" 'Evolution' is a fine word for the masses, but when someone learned is supposed to be specific, a vague word isn't the best choice."
Evolution as used in Biology is hereditable change of gene frequencies through time (from one generation to the next). Consequently, it is technically the scientifically correct term to use when referring to microbial resistance or any other form of genetic change being of compared across generations. It has a precise meaning in Biology, and there is really nothing "vague" about it. Rather, it is your understanding that is vague.
Your assertion that is a "general term" is factually inaccurate when the term is used in a scientific context, although I will certainly admit and as the article points out, it has other more "general meanings". Unfortunately, the general level of scientific understanding of evolutionary theory and use of the term is woefully deficient, even among broad swaths of the scientific community that is in a position to know better. Among the general public, at least the American public, it is practically non-existent. One could only use other scientific terms to describe the change of microbial resistance through time, if one means to imply that it changes through some mechanism other than by evolution (by means of natural selection). It is a well known scientific fact that microbial resistance is genetically based, and consequently, the contemporary consesus view is that changes in microbial resistance should be viewed as evolving in the correct, technical sense of the term.
I fully agree with the thrust of the article. Scientists need to use the term evolution, when it is appropriate. We also need to educate the population about science. Signs that science education is slipping in America are all around us. Mathematics test scores are dropping because we are largely replacing the educational philosophy of the teaching of understanding of concepts for a policy of "no child left untested". Just note that all the major news feeds lump "science" and "technology", with the writers and editors largely unable to distinguish the difference between the two. Typically, what amounts to an on line advertisement for a new gaming technology or the psychological state of NASA astronauts is more likely to pass as a "SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY" story than is a story of a science issue. Even, when one looks at stories that should attempt to explain the science behind such topics, they tend to be covered more as if they were gossip columns or curiosity vignettes instead. Just take a look at GoggleNews feeds today, for a mindcheck.
Yes, it is time for scientists to begin to educate with regard to the pervasive evidence for evolution in our lives. A good place to start is at the molecular level, such as microbial genetics, where the public may hopefully be better able to understand the concepts involved and upon which they can build a greater level of understanding to address much more complicated issues, such issues as the evolution of human behavior. The world needs a better understaning of the latter, if we, Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758, are collectively to evolove in directions other than leading to our own extinction, as the vast majority (>90% of all species) have done.
I emphasize with your perspective, but perhaps rather than constraining the enthusiam for participation that might come from an editorial board, perhaps the biological community could take it upon itself to do more teaching and correction itself so that the number of shamefully inaccurate edits can be corrected. After all, it takes an expert only to save a copy of articles that he or she feels is essentially correct and sufficiently worth preserving and then reposting this to the website, perhaps with additional clarity and educational content, so that future offenders might be less inclined to alter it.
All you have to do is hit the save button on your browser and there is nothing to stop a group of like-minded individuals willing to write a webbot to repost these repeatedly. Presumably, the site owner's would welcome the assistance in maintaining its accuracy and finding ways to get experts to train the uneducated, thereby more readily maintaining
the integrity of well-supported and well-established facts in a
structured way through a loose amalgam of organizations and individuals
who benefit by the posting of accurate information on a broad variety
of subjects by Wikipedia.
We must keep in mind that any source of information that is meant as
an encyclopedia is only as good as the ability of the reader to understand and critique it and make use of the information in a logically coherent way. Obviously, this will be true for a variety of different users and hence there is a source for potential confusion. We should not however think that it is greater than what it would be without any Wikipedia pages.
I personally think if there is the need for an editorial board, it should
be taken up on an informal basis by scientific societies as it is only
they who could realistically be in a position to know what is expert
disucssion. These could then be farmed out to a community of educators
to add to and to improve upon. Perhaps, this is the idea behind
Citizenipedia. It makes little sense to create a scientific advisory
board, if there is not an educational component.
This effort attempts to provide the notion of attribution to "online freely available information" (OFAI) that Wikipedia lacks. For technical information and for reference purposes this is certainly important, although it should not be confused with accuracy of the information presented. First, it is worth saying that despite this drawback, Wikipedia is remarkable in providing a relatively high level of accuracy on many topics, without attribution. In a sense, human nature being what it is, the lack of attribution may be at times more conducive to accuracy than attribution just as it adds a level of noise to the Wikeipedia "signal".
The basic concepts behind the "content broker" ideas here raise some interesting issues. One is the notion that attribution ultimately leads to accuracy. Another is that assuming this is so, who will be designated as the ultimate authority for the "officially sanctioned version of reality" and how will they be chosen. It would seem that the latter is not as well addressed and one could use the "published" draft version on Biology as a very good example. I did not find the names of the authors, presumably withheld since it is still only a draft. However, I personally found it rather disorganized and failed to provide an adequate context for the understanding of how several extremely important historical ideas in Biology emerged. It did not do a good job of conceptually unifying the diverse subdisciplines of Biology or how they emerged in a historical context. It utterly failed to emphasize the primacy of the Darwinian concepts particularly as they relate to contemporary evolutionary biology (not that my having a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from a prestigous US uniersity necessarily fully qualifies me to advance criticism). Consequently, I found it difficult to imagine what general audience this "officially sanctioned version" would serve. There was no attributin given to the figures used. I found the use of footnotes as opposed to citations weak, although there were some useful hyperlinks provided in the footnotes. It felt as if it were written by committee.
In the Wikipedia model the "version" evolves in large part out of consensus and use. I see this being a much more structured, more formalized and more slowly evolving enterprise under the "content broker" model since it would involve a limited number of "experts". It would seems as if the approach will necessarily require multiple official sanctioned pages for a single topic to satisfy critics who shall surely emerge from academia or instead be prepared for multiple communities of Citizenpedias that compete for attention on the net. The former would seem to require a much more elaborate framework of protocols to weed out fairly/honestly/ruthlessly? "not officially sanctioned versions of reality". The latter could certainly be useful and interesting as ever more clearly defined alternate versions of reality are brought forth, although it is difficult to envision just how this necessarily improves accuracy.
No doubt the Republican and Democratic sanctioned versions of "the versions on global climate change might ultimately make good fodder for the Daily Show, which one may wonder might not prompt politicians to step in and have the government act as the final arbiter of the officially sanctioned version. Given the new push to monitor everyone's every move and thought while on the net, this will perhaps be the only ultimately evolutionarly stable outcome and the Brave New World will emerge in which the Gregorian calendar will be replaced by the officially sanctioned one in which it is always 1984 and there will always be perpetual war against perceived terrorists, extremeists, fanatics, etc and hence a need to keep the population in a constant state of agitation so that problems can be created faster than they can be solved.
My sense is that if one perceives OFAI as valuable, it might be worth considering a more broadly conceived notion of a registry of federated "content brokers", rather than an
Obviously, you are not a lawyer, as Cisco is well within its legal rights to extend its use of the trademark on a product that it owns the trademark to and which appeared for sale (18 December 2006), well before any Apple product of the same name has appeared for sale on the market. In fact Apple has no iPhone product. It only has an announcement of a product and such an announcment does not contitute FTC acceptance of its purported claim to the use of a previously actively registered trademark name currently on file with the FTC. One can not squat on a trademark unless one actually has a product that is actually for sale. Further, the clause in the filing requirements necessary for maintaining one's trademark permit a grace period and Cisco is certainly well within the grace period as is evident given the date they filed suit against Apple. Consequently, there is simply no legal basis to make the false inference that any falsification was made. To my knowledge I have yet to hear any Apple executive indicate that it has filed a formal request to use Cisco's lawfully registered and lawfully extended trademark name.
If Cisco, which has had the trademark registered as required by law is unable to prevent Apple from using the iPhone name because Apple's iPhone is a cell phone whereas Cisco's iPhone is an Internet Phone, Apple is in big trouble. Unlike Apple Records, which had no recourse within the marketplace to prevent Apple Computer from selling music under the Apple label despite a court ordered enforcement provision, Cisco is not without such recourse. They could quite easily incorporate firmware in their routers to deny any Apple iPhone devices from attempting to link to the internet about 85% of which is poweerd by Cisco routers. That would mean that Apple's i(Cell)Phone would be essentially brain dead before it is even born, since Cisco's iPhone trademark would apply to any iPhone capable of accessing the internet. How ungeeky and uncool would you be if you had an iPhone that couldn't even link to the internet and you paid $500 plus $80/month in cell phone connect fees?
Apple better start thinking about settling rather than attempting to rely on its lawyers or it and its customers could get seriously burned by using an Apple iPhone device (or should one say a Cingular iCellPhone? Indeed, it is more likely that Apple's lawyers have finally informed their client that they really don't have a case and that they really need to negotiate a settlement with Cisco, lest things turn out badly for Apple and their self-inflicted PR disaster.
I'd be willing to bet that Apple settles this to Cisco's satisfaction before their phone actually appears on the market. They will find some way to save face with their cult followers and end the nightmare before it gets worse for them.
To put it a little differently, don't mess with the plumber unless you want your sewer to start backing up on you.
I think little by little you will see China and Japan emerge as a countries more interested in uses of space for earth observation and telecommunications. It will take them time as they tend to do things slowly, with consensus and take the longer term view. However, they know how to get us to pay for it all indirectly, by selling us their debt.
We will probably stop laughing when they start hiring our best scientific minds, as well as continue to train their own superstars, and come to some accomodation with the Russians and Europeans. Memories in this country are short and they fail to appreciate that the Bushites shut down our linear accellerator programs and largely ceded the future of particle physics to the Europeans. They have tried to cede stem cell and earth-baseed environmental research to others as well. Theirs is a general push to reduce science spending generally so as to better support military and funding in Iraq and weapons development.
Its perhaps symbolic that the Bush Administration is so interested in going to Mars as they may have a better understanding of just how far we will have to travel just to get out of the deep, deep hole of a budget defict they have dug for us than they are generally given credit for.
" Cisco BOUGHT a company that had the iPhone trademark. Big difference."
From a legal perspective this is irrelevant. They OWN the trademark and have prior use of it. As it stands now, Cisco has the potential to capture all of any profit Apple may make from selling its "iPhone" as well as potentially triple damages, if the court finds the violation flagrant and willful. My guess is when their legal team finally explains this to them, they will settle with Cisco. What price Cisco will extract from Apple in exchange for dropping the suit is an open question. They might simply drop it for the good PR they will have received at Apple's expense or they may extract strategic or monetary consessions from Apple.
Your rewriting of the history of the Cisco InfoGear purchase is rather silly. For Cisco the iPhone is only one of many TCP/IP products that it is rolling out in a variety of markets that will ultimately integrate media and data telecommunications generally across ALL platforms in a multiply-networked universe, with of course, Cisco at its center.
I wouldn't say Apple suffered a slap in the face from Cisco. Rather it seems that Apple simply slipped up and bumped its head.
Your attempt to rewrite the history surrounding the Cisco acciquisition of InfoGear and its strategic goals can hardly be used to justify the blatant misappropriation of the "iPhone" trademark by the Apple rumor-mill. It is hard to imagine that the Cisco purchase of InfoGear or its rollout of the iPhone was or is now " an act of desperation" and an attempt to "capitalize on the buzz" of the rollout of a single gaget, especially since these plans were laid out over 5 years ago as part of a much broader rollout of numerous other "TCP/IP networked appliances" (ie conference phones, home settop TV/Cable entertainment systems, wireless routers, etc].
If there is a buzz here it may be associated with the daze which seems to overcome "Apple fan's" efforts to spin the Apple "iPhone" launch fiasco.
Cisco sees VOIP and TC/IP integration services, such as Skype, as a complement of its larger strategic vision in that for a relatively small fee (typically under $30 per month and which will be driven lower as the result of mass marketing) one can have unlimited VOIP/and TCP/IP service. Such phones are now going for about $80 and can be expected to drop to under $50 as the Walmarts and Office Depots of the world begin to ramp up their marketing. The LinkSys cellular link is presently more expensive (but is currently available at about $200), but costs will come down for cellular versions as well as hardware interoperability issues are resolved. Likewise, software interfaces will greatly improve on these essentially "open" devices. One is already seeing the ability of many to swap SIM cards in order to "transfer" ones phone to another cellular carrier, without the consumer being held hostage to a single wireless carrier. This "open" solution is good for customers.
Apple has sought shelter under the wing of AT&T in its attempt to enter the telecommunications market and its not surprising that AT&T is more than happy to oblige as the traditional telecommunications companies have the most at stake in the inevitable shift to VOIP and TCIP/IP services and away from POTS. My guess is that if the Apple phone is successful, AT&T will buy Apple or at least its "phone division" to keep it from spining out of its orbit. Why Apple fans want to become captives of Cingular (an AT&T subsidiary) is beyond me (as a Cingular customer living in a market with only a few relatively bad [expensive] choices for celluar service).
I think Apple's snub of Cisco's efforts to cooperate will eventually be more widely recognized as a strategic blunder, which will hurt the company as it attempts to compete with other "iPhone-like gaget/gear companies". Its also hard to see how a "spectacular" interface, whose functionality can be duplicated by third partiy mimics, will provide value over and above the roughly $380 ($300 for the phone and $80/month for the bandwidth) premium Apple phone users will need to pay to obtain essentially the same functionality from IEEE 802.11g devices. The high price will keep their market share minute compared to the rapidly unfolding commoditization of IEEE 802.11g devices, whose LCD screens and/or touchpads can be modified to suit a variety of user preferences in multiple niche markets.
"Beware of finding what you're looking for." -- R. W. Hamming
My sense is that in some ways as the overall telecommunications market converges over IP, Apple is facing many of the same stresses with regard to openness as Apple is now. It will eventually have to face up to the diversity of an already oversaturated market and the trend to more open standards necessary for interoperability in a multinetworked environment. I think this is why the iPhone fiasco seems to have created a disturbance in the force for many inhabitants/captives of the Apple universe. It creates a realization that simply being "cool" and PR savy doesn't necessarily equate to strategic longterm viability and market influence in a universe of coliding universes. The iPhone fiasco only drew attention to the strategic weakness of proprietary platforms such as Apple's. If its gravitational pull is small a proprietary platform has little chance to hold its elements in orbit.
In this sense Cisco with its enormus size is much more stragically and centrally placed. Its size provides the gravitational pull in the marketplace and the fact that given its position is essentially pure networking and hence, TCP/IP at its core. Hence, it is platform agnostic and able to coexist with multiple platforms that it draws into its orbit. Having TCP/IP at its core creates a more general form of an "open platform" than is available to Apple.
My sense is that overtime, "smaller" players, such as Apple, will only become buisness elements embedded in much larger corporate entities either merged or in strategic alliances. Apple doesn't extert enough influence in telecommunications to alter the direction of the overall market over the longer term. The iPhone "launch" shows the Apple's weakness and just how constrained and squeeze it is in attempting to enter the larger telecommuncations market. I do wish them luck as a consumer, we need as many choices as possible. However, also as a consumer, I must also recognize that with convergence comes the essential need to scale up in order to address market diversity and interoperability. Otherwise, I will simply be hostage to $500 phones (that do not even include the fees to access the network).
A more interesting question is whether ATT, which now owns Cingular and upon which Apple's phone will live or die, will use its constraint on Apple to ultimately swallow it whole or just place it firmly in orbit, as ATT girds to battle other corporate titans, who seek global control in a converging telecommunications/multimedia universe. In that sense who replaces Jobs might be a moot question, as the next CEO might be simply a VP in a much larger enterprise. My own sense is that this won't happen over the next few years, as the air must clear to determine how much damage has been done to Apple's financials over the stock options problems.
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The legislation will never be passed as it sets out to create "extensions to the prohibitions on the spread of false information". REPUBLICANS WILL NEVER STAND FOR THIS. It would put FOX News Out of Business
The answer to this is not attempting to modify MSNBC's behavior from being yet another corporation that only thinks of profits, which is of course probably true, but rather simply to make it clear that you will not vote for anyone who would willingly allow the American political discourse to be "owned" by anyone. Require that your candidates will only receive your votes if they do not participate in an event in which the "message" is controlled. Make the candidates complicity in rigged events an issue. Another approach is to test the boundaries of exactly what it is MSNBC paid for to permit them to claim that "other sources" (presumably video) at the event can be used. Did they pay the University for exclusive use of the hall? Did the administrator actually have the rights to grant exclusive access on state property, etc? Let MSNBC tarnish its public image (if that is possible) by going after you in court. Investigate and expose the complicity; enlighten your fellow citizens.
Better yet start a grass roots video campaign to cover the candidates independent of corporate media that can appear on YouTube or other such alternative media (as I recall someone had a Makaka moment over this kind of coverage) and put control back into the hands of the American people (although don't jump to the conclusion they would be wise enough to know what to do with it eg. "Mistakes were made!" [picture Bush voters with heads bowed in shame here]). It might just displace "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars" for public attention. You could even restrict rights by corporations to the material without payment for use that could be used to support the effort.
The general topic is worthy of discussion. Just how far are candidates willing to go to prostrate themselves before the media overlords? Just how far will the overall media circus atmosphere evolve toward full media ownership as Ruppert Murdoch proposed.
Compared to the "Dog ate My Homework Routine" we're now getting from the White House, Wikipedia just got its credibility moded up.
By this standard, the students will have to have the White House website blocked as well. Its simply not fact based and the last thing we should be doing to further damage the already declining morals of American youth would be to expose them to the immorality of this presidency. Especially, since today the White House announced that POTUS has made it official. He is now on record as supporting the World Bank president's right to get blowjobs at taxpayers expense. I had thought that kind of moral failing went out with the Clinton years.
I'm shocked just the quickly right wing nuts on the wheels of state have lost their bearings. No wonder the Repooplican party is in such disarray. One has to ask just how long they will continue to engage in this kind of facistic behavior just to continue to provide cover.
If you believe the emails were lost, then I have the scent of some dog poop I'd like to sell you. Its all part of my effort to raise funds on behalf of the NEW REPUBLICAN VALUES!
Nempimania is strictly for Japanese. US drivers simply don't have the culture, patience, stamina, and long-term stick-to-it-ness to get these kinds of mpg over long term useage. US drivers think they get bragging rights by increasing tire sizes, driving Humvee's, out accelerating the next guy, and paying extra for high-octane fuel. In the US status = consumption. The higher your consumption the greater your status.
In the US, bragging rights might more likely go to the guy who says he gets 150 mpg in his OldMobile convertible and can make everyone believe he does, even though he really gets 15. In the US perception trumps reality when it comes to status.
Looks like a class action suit in the making.
Ask this question in the Muslim world and the frequency of "believers" is likely to be even higher.
Perhaps its so widespread because the religious among us are very good and very busy at persecuting non-believers in one manner or another.
There need not be a gene to explain it, only a propensity to believe in "safe" ideas. Believing in god(s) is sort of like believing in the power of money. I would venture the percentage of people who recognize the importance of money is even higher than the percentage that believe in god(s). Does anyone seem to be suggesting that the belief in the value for money is also genetically based?
Its also likely that even though many are eager to express their "personal relatioship" with God, far fewer would be willing to admit that God, being busy with important things, has absolutely no interest in them and couldn't care less about them because they are simply far too insignificant for "God" to bother taking the time out of her busy schedule to "presonally contact" them. Now who is going to admit to that? Is there a gene for this type of avoidance behavior as well?
One tries to place oneself in situations that are regarded as "safe". Such behaviors will be selected for if over time, they do in fact place people in "safer" situations and these people on average have more offspring. The choices or the bases for these choices do not need to be rational to respond to selection, nor do they need to remain constant throughout human history. At the height of the "Golden Age" in Greece, it was accepted among some circles that the earth rotated about the sun. During later less enlightened times, such ideas were distinctly hazardous to one's health because of religious persecution (eg. death of Giordano Bruno). Selection against those believing in heliocentric theories is now less severe (thank goodness, considering that modern science clearly demonstrates that the earth does indeed orbit the sun).
Many avoidance behaviors may have evolved because they are not rational, since rationality would require people to be aware of them and their awareness may in and of itself be more likely to either confuse or make the "true motives" known to one's adversaries/competitors. For some, their thinking processes may be too slow so its better if they act without thinking, and so long as they on average make the "safe" choice, they will not be at a competitive disadvantage.
"... while some random company that adds nothing of value is"
Publishing books can hardly be seen as not adding value. Could you imagine how combersome and unworkable a system there would be if everyone just printed out
or photocopied raw manuscripts? Plagarism would be rampant and citation would be next to impossible. Also publishing houses provide distribution, and often are the
only outlets for many obscure works and often manage storage of unpurched volumes yet to be sold.
Can web-based systems work? Yes, they probably could but there needs to be a lot of infrastructure in place before it will replace published works. Take for example, hosting? How would this be paid for. Should we require that webhosts agree to permanent, indefinte long term storage for all time? Who will upgrade the media? Paper, degrades far more slowly than electronic media. How about security issues, these are greater for electronic media as the potential to "deface" previously published text is greater and more available to crackers and other miscreants. What about citation? Which website should be cited? What about date of publication, etc.? These are not insignificant issues. I for one, would be lothe to have a government system so centrally organized that some future politicans can begin to restrict or destroy what can or has been published, simply because they find it expedient to do so.
Yes, I believe that in the long run we should be moving to freely available web-based publication for research articles, but to think that it scientific publication is just as simple as posting HTML to a webpage, is a gross oversimplification of the scientiric publication process. Likewise, it counter productive to destroy the business of scientific publication houses, without consideration of the attendant loss of expertise, talent, and resources, without providing a beneficial and well-reasoned pathway for all parties, often quite well-meaning even if money-making enterprises. The entire move will require careful deliberation and quite possibly lare expenditures to complete, even though they will hopefully save money in the long run and make scientific works more accessible.
If its post-arthroscopic it is related to the joints and since emphysema is a lung disease, your application for tenure is hereby declined!
This is hardly likely, except in a miniscule fraction of research libraries. Although there are reams of papers whose finding are essentially worthless, often what is worthless to one investigator is often of value to another. This is the case because research papers seldom contain a single relevant "finding". Often papes contain important and valuable data, but the interpretations or methods used to analyze it are faulty or poorly chosen.
A much, much bigger problem is that the average Joe has no interest in reading ANY technical publications (on line or otherwise) and for many who try they really don't have a clue as to what it means. Just look at how the science of climate change is covered in the news and in print. The entire science is predicated largely on the solution of differential equations and numerical analysis. Just how many readers are really in a position to read and properly interpret such results? The percentage is extremely small.
I have published "obscure papers" myself. I would love it if they were more widely available, read, and appreciated, but regardless of whether people would find them "useless" or "valuable" it seems unlikely that these will be even read, except by a few experts.
"The guy who's views this AC is pushing is a famous Islamic creationist and Holocaust denier."
Sounds only as if he is simply an idiot as far as I can tell.
Perhaps, it is that you haven't made yourself clear and I have misunderstood what it is you are saying. You seem to be suggesting that use of the term "evolution" is inappropriate and there is a more appropriate word to describe the process discussed in the article. I could only conclude that you were suggesting that some other mechanism was involved.
I still fail to see what specific word you would substitute for evolution to talk about changes in gene frequency that would result in a change in microbial resistance?
You keep asserting that there is a more appropriate term, but what term would it be?
I find it difficult to understand how the word you want to use is both (generally) more specific. I admit that there may in fact that there may be multiple evolutionary mechanisms that one could discuss, although ultimately there would be one genetic expression (genetic combination) of the typically four bases over the relevant region of the DNA/RNA and a spectrum of selective regimes depending upon the specific mechanisms of selection operating on the particlar combination being expressed as the phenotype. I think one would need to call it evolution and then speak of the subcomponent or subgroup of evolutionary processes that might best fit the particular circumstance. In my mind it would be inappropriate to choose a term that does not describe the general set of potential descriptors, to all of which evolution would apply. To me that was the point of the article. It demonstrated that biomedical papers were being written using general terms that were overgeneralized to the point that the use of the term was most inappropriately not appearing in discussion of the causal mechanisms at all.
Yes, one certainly could overgeneralize, but then the "telescopic view" would be to at least some degree incorrect and inaccurate and could lead the reader to misunderstand the actual processes involved, perhaps even concluding that evolution has not occurred, when in fact it has. I think that is the point the author was trying to convey. Hence, I read your comments as missing the point of the article. If I understand your current comment, it is that the word you seek is actually and adjective that could be used that provides a greater clarification and refinement of what specific type of evolutionary mechnism is being discussed (ie "saltational evolution" or "gradual evolution" etc.).
Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but I live in a state where there are active efforts to ban science from Biology classroom and, as a scientist, am very concerned over this regressive and appaling trend. The price of freedom to do science and use reason, comes at a cost of constant vigilence.
You hit this nail right on the head. Its just a shame that nails have more sense than the apostles of anti-evolution.
They do not to respond to reason. Thus, I always like to point out that because science does permit reality to be objectively assessed. Hence, it allows us to understand how the natural world is organized and how evolution has actually worked to produce all the life around us. Fro them to prove this to themselves, they can easily conduct an experiment. The experiment will prove to them that if God did create life on earth, then he used evolution to do it.
The experimeent is fairly simple. Let them place their right hand on a Bible and then swear that they will not bear false witness under penalty of eternal damnation to what they see during the course of the experiment. With their left hand, let them hold up a high resolution color picture of chimpanzee as they stand in front of a mirror, positioned so that they can observe both their own reflection and that in the photograph of the chimp. It is easy to use science (reason) to demonstrate that both are 99% identical at the genomic level and that all known fossil and physical evidence establishes that the common ancestor of both images in the mirror diverged between 4.5 - 7 million years ago. Now let them deny before their own God that is no similarity and let them disagree with God as to the evolutionary source of that similarity.
I like to smile when I think about the fact henceforth, they they are destined to live a life trapped by the contradictions of their own righteousness and stupidity. Although one might at first feel the inclination to feel sorry for them, it would be entirely inappropriate to extend pitty. Their's is a fate they deserve.
A fair point. To really get a handle on the consequence of evolution one really needs knowledge of both the genetic mechanism (specifically its state and mode of self-assembly) and the nature of the selective regime (just exactly what selective mechanism has caused (or is causing) the evolution to have occurred (continue to occur if directed). Asteroid impacts, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other large scale phenomena extreme selective regimes are likely to be too infrequent and when they do occur result in nearly complete local extinct to permit much hereditable change, relative to the great many of life's events, each sometimes seemingly mundane, but occurring so repeatedly over the life of an organism that the selection is very "fine tuned". It is not surprising that Darwin was drawn to sexual selection in studying evolution, because of its uquiquity, its regularity, and its very large phenotypic effects. Those seeking to find how animals "predict" eatherquakes have, not surprisingly, been generally disappointed to discover that there is very little evidence, if any to suggest than ANY organism can actually do so.
The future of evolutionary research will continue to be directed toward understanding the repeated regularity within the genome, especially where this regularity results from genetic similarity across organisms that share a relatively close common ancestry. The HOX gene story is probably a good example of how a better understanding of molecular events associated with specific genetic configurations are related to larger phenotypic expression and hence evolution in body plan in vertebrates. However, Pauling's discovery of the difference of a single amino acid substitution in Hemoglobin is responsible for sickle-cell trait (and as subsquently shown related to malarial resistance) demonstates that a seemingly insignificant amount of genomic change (one or a few base pairs at a wobble position) can have a profound effect on the surviability of the phenotype and on evolution in humans.
If one models evolutionary change as a Markovian process, the latter makes clear that there the values of elements of transition matrices that can be extremely unstable, and that at the mappings between genotype and phenotype can be highly ill-conditioned. Nonetheless, even though much of evolution may take place "at the edge of chaos", this does not mean that the mechanisms involved are either haphazard or truly chaotic. In any event it is certain that they are not due to "intelligent design", since they are so demonstrably directed and often redirected by changes in the selective regime. This has been conclusively demonstrated in the ecent work of Peter Grant on evolution in Darwin's finches. Grant and coworkers clearly show that beak dimensions are selected from year to year, largely as a result of rainfall patterns and differential seed availability, moving back and forth in a clearly channeled directions, but without any particular stable direction (toward any particular "more intelligent design") aside from that imposed on the system by a limited number of parameters in the environment.
If microbial existence exists it is due to changes in its genome. The important scientific question relate to what specific changes have occurred and to what extent have such changes affected microbial resistance. Unless you are attempting to argue that there are other kinds of "objects" other than the well known (typically 4) purine or pyrimidine bases that constitute the "genetic alphabet" your arguments are of dubius scientific utility.
The grammar of the language you use to describe these "physical" objects is irrelevant. One could use English, Russian, or Japanese, all of which have different grammars and "objects" in this sense. However, whatever the grammar of the language you chose to make the description, the measurable correlations between a specific level of resistance that results from a specific genome will be the same.
Sophistry is an ancient artform, but its lack of value in scientirfic discussions greatly limits its usefulness. Such arguments are better suited to discussions of religion. Rather than being specific and accurate, you have managed to miss the point of the original article entirely.
Good luck in your "alternate universe".
" 'Evolution' is a fine word for the masses, but when someone learned is supposed to be specific, a vague word isn't the best choice."
Evolution as used in Biology is hereditable change of gene frequencies through time (from one generation to the next). Consequently, it is technically the scientifically correct term to use when referring to microbial resistance or any other form of genetic change being of compared across generations. It has a precise meaning in Biology, and there is really nothing "vague" about it. Rather, it is your understanding that is vague.
Your assertion that is a "general term" is factually inaccurate when the term is used in a scientific context, although I will certainly admit and as the article points out, it has other more "general meanings". Unfortunately, the general level of scientific understanding of evolutionary theory and use of the term is woefully deficient, even among broad swaths of the scientific community that is in a position to know better. Among the general public, at least the American public, it is practically non-existent. One could only use other scientific terms to describe the change of microbial resistance through time, if one means to imply that it changes through some mechanism other than by evolution (by means of natural selection). It is a well known scientific fact that microbial resistance is genetically based, and consequently, the contemporary consesus view is that changes in microbial resistance should be viewed as evolving in the correct, technical sense of the term.
I fully agree with the thrust of the article. Scientists need to use the term evolution, when it is appropriate. We also need to educate the population about science.
Signs that science education is slipping in America are all around us. Mathematics test scores are dropping because we are largely replacing the educational philosophy of the teaching of understanding of concepts for a policy of "no child left untested". Just note that all the major news feeds lump "science" and "technology", with the writers and editors largely unable to distinguish the difference between the two. Typically, what amounts to an on line advertisement for a new gaming technology or the psychological state of NASA astronauts is more likely to pass as a "SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY" story than is a story of a science issue. Even, when one looks at stories that should attempt to explain the science behind such topics, they tend to be covered more as if they were gossip columns or curiosity vignettes instead. Just take a look at GoggleNews feeds today, for a mindcheck.
Yes, it is time for scientists to begin to educate with regard to the pervasive evidence for evolution in our lives. A good place to start is at the molecular level, such as microbial genetics, where the public may hopefully be better able to understand the concepts involved and upon which they can build a greater level of understanding to address much more complicated issues, such issues as the evolution of human behavior. The world needs a better understaning of the latter, if we, Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758, are collectively to evolove in directions other than leading to our own extinction, as the vast majority (>90% of all species) have done.
If I understand both sides of this argument, it would seem that Cisco stock is greatly undervalued.
I emphasize with your perspective, but perhaps rather than constraining the enthusiam for participation that might come from an editorial board, perhaps the biological community could take it upon itself to do more teaching and correction itself so that the number of shamefully inaccurate edits can be corrected. After all, it takes an expert only to save a copy of articles that he or she feels is essentially correct and sufficiently worth preserving and then reposting this to the website, perhaps with additional clarity and educational content, so that future offenders might be less inclined to alter it. All you have to do is hit the save button on your browser and there is nothing to stop a group of like-minded individuals willing to write a webbot to repost these repeatedly. Presumably, the site owner's would welcome the assistance in maintaining its accuracy and finding ways to get experts to train the uneducated, thereby more readily maintaining the integrity of well-supported and well-established facts in a structured way through a loose amalgam of organizations and individuals who benefit by the posting of accurate information on a broad variety of subjects by Wikipedia. We must keep in mind that any source of information that is meant as an encyclopedia is only as good as the ability of the reader to understand and critique it and make use of the information in a logically coherent way. Obviously, this will be true for a variety of different users and hence there is a source for potential confusion. We should not however think that it is greater than what it would be without any Wikipedia pages. I personally think if there is the need for an editorial board, it should be taken up on an informal basis by scientific societies as it is only they who could realistically be in a position to know what is expert disucssion. These could then be farmed out to a community of educators to add to and to improve upon. Perhaps, this is the idea behind Citizenipedia. It makes little sense to create a scientific advisory board, if there is not an educational component.
This effort attempts to provide the notion of attribution to "online freely available information" (OFAI) that Wikipedia lacks. For technical information and for reference purposes this is certainly important, although it should not be confused with accuracy of the information presented. First, it is worth saying that despite this drawback, Wikipedia is remarkable in providing a relatively high level of accuracy on many topics, without attribution. In a sense, human nature being what it is, the lack of attribution may be at times more conducive to accuracy than attribution just as it adds a level of noise to the Wikeipedia "signal".
The basic concepts behind the "content broker" ideas here raise some interesting issues. One is the notion that attribution ultimately leads to accuracy. Another is that assuming this is so, who will be designated as the ultimate authority for the "officially sanctioned version of reality" and how will they be chosen. It would seem that the latter is not as well addressed and one could use the "published" draft version on Biology as a very good example. I did not find the names of the authors, presumably withheld since it is still only a draft. However, I personally found it rather disorganized and failed to provide an adequate context for the understanding of how several extremely important historical ideas in Biology emerged. It did not do a good job of conceptually unifying the diverse subdisciplines of Biology or how they emerged in a historical context. It utterly failed to emphasize the primacy of the Darwinian concepts particularly as they relate to contemporary evolutionary biology (not that my having a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from a prestigous US uniersity necessarily fully qualifies me to advance criticism). Consequently, I found it difficult to imagine what general audience this "officially sanctioned version" would serve. There was no attributin given to the figures used. I found the use of footnotes as opposed to citations weak, although there were some useful hyperlinks provided in the footnotes. It felt as if it were written by committee.
In the Wikipedia model the "version" evolves in large part out of consensus and use. I see this being a much more structured, more formalized and more slowly evolving enterprise under the "content broker" model since it would involve a limited number of "experts". It would seems as if the approach will necessarily require multiple official sanctioned pages for a single topic to satisfy critics who shall surely emerge from academia or instead be prepared for multiple communities of Citizenpedias that compete for attention on the net. The former would seem to require a much more elaborate framework of protocols to weed out fairly/honestly/ruthlessly? "not officially sanctioned versions of reality". The latter could certainly be useful and interesting as ever more clearly defined alternate versions of reality are brought forth, although it is difficult to envision just how this necessarily improves accuracy.
No doubt the Republican and Democratic sanctioned versions of "the versions on global climate change might ultimately make good fodder for the Daily Show, which one may wonder might not prompt politicians to step in and have the government act as the final arbiter of the officially sanctioned version. Given the new push to monitor everyone's every move and thought while on the net, this will perhaps be the only ultimately evolutionarly stable outcome and the Brave New World will emerge in which the Gregorian calendar will be replaced by the officially sanctioned one in which it is always 1984 and there will always be perpetual war against perceived terrorists, extremeists, fanatics, etc and hence a need to keep the population in a constant state of agitation so that problems can be created faster than they can be solved.
My sense is that if one perceives OFAI as valuable, it might be worth considering a more broadly conceived notion of a registry of federated "content brokers", rather than an
Obviously, you are not a lawyer, as Cisco is well within its legal rights to extend its use of the trademark on a product that it owns the trademark to and which appeared for sale (18 December 2006), well before any Apple product of the same name has appeared for sale on the market. In fact Apple has no iPhone product. It only has an announcement of a product and such an announcment does not contitute FTC acceptance of its purported claim to the use of a previously actively registered trademark name currently on file with the FTC. One can not squat on a trademark unless one actually has a product that is actually for sale. Further, the clause in the filing requirements necessary for maintaining one's trademark permit a grace period and Cisco is certainly well within the grace period as is evident given the date they filed suit against Apple. Consequently, there is simply no legal basis to make the false inference that any falsification was made. To my knowledge I have yet to hear any Apple executive indicate that it has filed a formal request to use Cisco's lawfully registered and lawfully extended trademark name.
If Cisco, which has had the trademark registered as required by law is unable to prevent Apple from using the iPhone name because Apple's iPhone is a cell phone whereas Cisco's iPhone is an Internet Phone, Apple is in big trouble. Unlike Apple Records, which had no recourse within the marketplace to prevent Apple Computer from selling music under the Apple label despite a court ordered enforcement provision, Cisco is not without such recourse. They could quite easily incorporate firmware in their routers to deny any Apple iPhone devices from attempting to link to the internet about 85% of which is poweerd by Cisco routers. That would mean that Apple's i(Cell)Phone would be essentially brain dead before it is even born, since Cisco's iPhone trademark would apply to any iPhone capable of accessing the internet. How ungeeky and uncool would you be if you had an iPhone that couldn't even link to the internet and you paid $500 plus $80/month in cell phone connect fees?
Apple better start thinking about settling rather than attempting to rely on its lawyers or it and its customers could get seriously burned by using an Apple iPhone device (or should one say a Cingular iCellPhone? Indeed, it is more likely that Apple's lawyers have finally informed their client that they really don't have a case and that they really need to negotiate a settlement with Cisco, lest things turn out badly for Apple and their self-inflicted PR disaster.
I'd be willing to bet that Apple settles this to Cisco's satisfaction before their phone actually appears on the market. They will find some way to save face with their cult followers and end the nightmare before it gets worse for them.
To put it a little differently, don't mess with the plumber unless you want your sewer to start backing up on you.
I think little by little you will see China and Japan emerge as a countries more interested in uses of space for earth observation and telecommunications. It will take them time as they tend to do things slowly, with consensus and take the longer term view. However, they know how to get us to pay for it all indirectly, by selling us their debt.
We will probably stop laughing when they start hiring our best scientific minds, as well as continue to train their own superstars, and come to some accomodation with the Russians and Europeans. Memories in this country are short and they fail to appreciate that the Bushites shut down our linear accellerator programs and largely ceded the future of particle physics to the Europeans. They have tried to cede stem cell and earth-baseed environmental research to others as well. Theirs is a general push to reduce science spending generally so as to better support military and funding in Iraq and weapons development.
Its perhaps symbolic that the Bush Administration is so interested in going to Mars as they may have a better understanding of just how far we will have to travel just to get out of the deep, deep hole of a budget defict they have dug for us than they are generally given credit for.
"
Cisco BOUGHT a company that had the iPhone trademark. Big difference."
From a legal perspective this is irrelevant. They OWN the trademark and have prior use of it. As it stands now, Cisco has the potential to capture all of any profit Apple may make from selling its "iPhone" as well as potentially triple damages, if the court finds the violation flagrant and willful. My guess is when their legal team finally explains this to them, they will settle with Cisco. What price Cisco will extract from Apple in exchange for dropping the suit is an open question. They might simply drop it for the good PR they will have received at Apple's expense or they may extract strategic or monetary consessions from Apple.
Your rewriting of the history of the Cisco InfoGear purchase is rather silly. For Cisco the iPhone is only one of many TCP/IP products that it is rolling out in a variety of markets that will ultimately integrate media and data telecommunications generally across ALL platforms in a multiply-networked universe, with of course, Cisco at its center.
I wouldn't say Apple suffered a slap in the face from Cisco. Rather it seems that Apple simply slipped up and bumped its head.
Your attempt to rewrite the history surrounding the Cisco acciquisition of InfoGear and its strategic goals can hardly be used to justify the blatant misappropriation of the "iPhone" trademark by the Apple rumor-mill. It is hard to imagine that the Cisco purchase of InfoGear or its rollout of the iPhone was or is now " an act of desperation" and an attempt to "capitalize on the buzz" of the rollout of a single gaget, especially since these plans were laid out over 5 years ago as part of a much broader rollout of numerous other "TCP/IP networked appliances" (ie conference phones, home settop TV/Cable entertainment systems, wireless routers, etc].
If there is a buzz here it may be associated with the daze which seems to overcome "Apple fan's" efforts to spin the Apple "iPhone" launch fiasco.
Cisco sees VOIP and TC/IP integration services, such as Skype, as a complement of its larger strategic vision in that for a relatively small fee (typically under $30 per month and which will be driven lower as the result of mass marketing) one can have unlimited VOIP/and TCP/IP service. Such phones are now going for about $80 and can be expected to drop to under $50 as the Walmarts and Office Depots of the world begin to ramp up their marketing. The LinkSys cellular link is presently more expensive (but is currently available at about $200), but costs will come down for cellular versions as well as hardware interoperability issues are resolved. Likewise, software interfaces will greatly improve on these essentially "open" devices. One is already seeing the ability of many to swap SIM cards in order to "transfer" ones phone to another cellular carrier, without the consumer being held hostage to a single wireless carrier. This "open" solution is good for customers.
Apple has sought shelter under the wing of AT&T in its attempt to enter the telecommunications market and its not surprising that AT&T is more than happy to oblige as the traditional telecommunications companies have the most at stake in the inevitable shift to VOIP and TCIP/IP services and away from POTS. My guess is that if the Apple phone is successful, AT&T will buy Apple or at least its "phone division" to keep it from spining out of its orbit. Why Apple fans want to become captives of Cingular (an AT&T subsidiary) is beyond me (as a Cingular customer living in a market with only a few relatively bad [expensive] choices for celluar service).
I think Apple's snub of Cisco's efforts to cooperate will eventually be more widely recognized as a strategic blunder, which will hurt the company as it attempts to compete with other "iPhone-like gaget/gear companies". Its also hard to see how a "spectacular" interface, whose functionality can be duplicated by third partiy mimics, will provide value over and above the roughly $380 ($300 for the phone and $80/month for the bandwidth) premium Apple phone users will need to pay to obtain essentially the same functionality from IEEE 802.11g devices. The high price will keep their market share minute compared to the rapidly unfolding commoditization of IEEE 802.11g devices, whose LCD screens and/or touchpads can be modified to suit a variety of user preferences in multiple niche markets.
"Beware of finding what you're looking for." -- R. W. Hamming
Good post.
My sense is that in some ways as the overall telecommunications market converges over IP, Apple is facing many of the same stresses with regard to openness as Apple is now. It will eventually have to face up to the diversity of an already oversaturated market and the trend to more open standards necessary for interoperability in a multinetworked environment. I think this is why the iPhone fiasco seems to have created a disturbance in the force for many inhabitants/captives of the Apple universe. It creates a realization that simply being "cool" and PR savy doesn't necessarily equate to strategic longterm viability and market influence in a universe of coliding universes. The iPhone fiasco only drew attention to the strategic weakness of proprietary platforms such as Apple's. If its gravitational pull is small a proprietary platform has little chance to hold its elements in orbit.
In this sense Cisco with its enormus size is much more stragically and centrally placed. Its size provides the gravitational pull in the marketplace and the fact that given its position is essentially pure networking and hence, TCP/IP at its core. Hence, it is platform agnostic and able to coexist with multiple platforms that it draws into its orbit. Having TCP/IP at its core creates a more general form of an "open platform" than is available to Apple.
My sense is that overtime, "smaller" players, such as Apple, will only become buisness elements embedded in much larger corporate entities either merged or in strategic alliances. Apple doesn't extert enough influence in telecommunications to alter the direction of the overall market over the longer term. The iPhone "launch" shows the Apple's weakness and just how constrained and squeeze it is in attempting to enter the larger telecommuncations market. I do wish them luck as a consumer, we need as many choices as possible. However, also as a consumer, I must also recognize that with convergence comes the essential need to scale up in order to address market diversity and interoperability. Otherwise, I will simply be hostage to $500 phones (that do not even include the fees to access the network).
A more interesting question is whether ATT, which now owns Cingular and upon which Apple's phone will live or die, will use its constraint on Apple to ultimately swallow it whole or just place it firmly in orbit, as ATT girds to battle other corporate titans, who seek global control in a converging telecommunications/multimedia universe. In that sense who replaces Jobs might be a moot question, as the next CEO might be simply a VP in a much larger enterprise. My own sense is that this won't happen over the next few years, as the air must clear to determine how much damage has been done to Apple's financials over the stock options problems.
"eave imaginative thought to those with the capacity for it."
Do you mean the Linux geeks?