I don't know about the original comments, but if you're curious to hear some of the aftermath, this link has a lot about what actually happened. The offending accusations appear to have something to do with (allegedly - don't sue me!) the plaintiff referring at-risk teens to a the Whitmore Academy, a youth center that (again, allegedly, although in this case charges were brought and the owner plead no contest - draw your own conclusion) had a history of abuse. In return for these referrals, it seems that the plaintiff was paid some money, and the woman accused of defaming her was real pissed off about this. At least that's what it looks like - the message board is a lot of arguing back and forth, and I frankly don't have the time to sift through it right now. In any case, though, it doesn't look like the original statements were altogether without merit to me...too bad they didn't actually fight it out in court, might have been a more reasonable outcome.
I'm all in favor of the paper trail, I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.
I'm astounded that given the accusations and evidence that this may have actually happened, you refuse to believe that it's possible! Point by point:
1) I can't speak to Diebold's willingness to fix an election, but you are vastly overestimating the risk involved. The whole company is not at stake here - more likely, if some vote tampering were discovered, it would "come to light" that a single rogue coder inserted the offending code into a routine security patch. This guy alone would take the fall for the bulk of it, that is, assuming rock-solid evidence (it would probably take a copy of the actual offending source code, since all other evidence of foul play evaporates in to the papertrail-less void) ever came to light. I believe people have already shown how easy it is to write a self-deleting virus that would remove all evidence of itself as soon as it did its work. (it's easy enough to make something get rid of every trace of itself even in a bloated mess like Windows; it's child's play when your company controls the design, security, and handling of the operating system, hardware, and software at every step along the way). If I had to guess, I would say that we're talking well under a 1% chance of discovery if most of the knowledge of details was confined to the top tier of the company. Even supposing this was discovered, after offering up a patsy, the company would probably just lose its voting machine business and continue as usual with its other stuff. Diebold was getting along fine before getting into the voting biz, they'll do fine if they're kicked out of it, too. Depending on the price, it could well be a very profitable (risk vs. rewards-wise) decision to throw an election to the highest bidder.
2) I'll agree, I don't know how easy it would be to get coders inside the company to knowingly agree to this level of risk. More than that, I would worry about the possibility of the involved coders leaking the fact that they did this so as to push responsibility up the chain if it looked like evidence was mounting against them. If I was to run such a scheme, I'd make sure to go outside the company for this bit, possibly by going to whoever wanted to buy the election to find someone that they trusted - anyone scummy enough to buy an election knows where to go for something like this. It would be easy enough for a high level Diebold exec to obtain API details to hand over, and any knowledgeable programmer could figure out what to do with them in a little time for the right price. Also, it's possible that the specs for the vote-shifting code could be phrased in such a way that the programmer didn't even realize what they were doing - I don't know how Diebold's software works, so I can't really comment any more on that. One easy way would be to ask a programmer to do a security audit, and prove any flaws by writing exploits for them. They hand over the info happily, assuming the flaws will be fixed, only to have them abused instead.
3) From the article, it appears that the people who installed most of the Diebold patches had no idea what was on them, so probably wouldn't face much exposure. And they did agree to install them, despite being suspicious about what was on them, so I think that point is proven - if given a malicious patch, they would install it.
4) This has been thoroughly addressed before - in some cases, all it takes is altering a single machine a local election result. Even for a national election, the margins are so small these days that a few thousand votes here and there really can shift
I think this is theoretically impossible. Wouldn't knowing how to make oneself smarter than one is technically make one smarter than one is already?
Absolutely not. A colony of bacteria can make itself larger by reproducing (given some resources and some time), and this does not imply that the colony is larger than is is already. For an example that is closer to the point, look at compiler design - you start with a clunky assembly language, and you ratchet up its capabilities to make tools. These make building better tools easier, and eventually we end up with a real programming language (unless you're a sadist, then you end up with Perl). This is used to make higher level tools that make it even easier to make higher level tools, and so on. To some extent, the ultimate goal of strong AI is to make the "best ever" programming language, one that can figure out how to turn a well defined problem statement into a chunk of machine code.
The next step in evolution (the evolution of evolution, if you will) is for the process itself to enjoy the fruits of its own labor, in other words for intelligence to figure out how to create smarter intelligence. I assume you can see where it goes from there - the growth goes super-exponential, and intelligence figures out how to optimize the process of optimizing intelligence, and so on. If you model this mathematically, you will end up with a divergence at some point, assuming there are no hard theoretical limits on the speed of computation. This is the basis of Kurzweil and other futurists claims that eventually humans won't even be able to comprehend the pace of changes that are coming.
Of course, this is all speculation until we actually make a computer program that can intelligently improve its own design. We're near the cusp of this thing evolutionarily, and at the moment it's unclear whether we're far enough over the hump to create something that may be able to smack us down before we destroy ourselves with our ridiculous infighting.
On that note, people always seem to be worried that computers are going to destroy or enslave us. To me, this gives us far too much credit. If this strong AI thing happens, the far likelier possibility is that the computers will just decide that we're irrelevant, or perhaps a minor nuisance. Humans may be pretty important to humans, but when it comes right down to it, we're just another boring branch on the tree of life. That is, unless we kill ourselves before we get there. Then we're just damn stupid, and a damn waste of billions of years of random walk style optimization.
Use of the anti-cheating service does nothing to affect the value of the student essays, which was $0 before being submitted, and $0 after being submitted.
Not true in all cases, though: see one of many paper mills, for example EssayTown.com. There a paper has a very definite value before being submitted, $34.99. Effective value after submission: $0. The use of an anti-cheating service renders a paper worthless to a student, and very well may require these companies to remove the paper from their database as a result (after all, you don't want to produce dissatisfied customers). Ensuring that a piece of work (especially an unpublished one) is not publicly available/searchable is a perfectly reasonable copyright claim, whether the probable use that a paying customer would have for that work is ethical or not, and making it publicly searchable can in some instances cause real damages. Keep in mind that plagiarism is legal - it may be immoral, lazy, and asinine, but it's still legal, especially if the IP holder has no interest in enforcing the copyright.
You can easily make a fair use argument, it's being used purely for educational, non-profit purposes. And let's be honest, none of these students is actually producing anything that's inherently valuable, we're talking high school level papers here. Their proprietary attitude towards the utterly useless things they're writing is kind of amusing.
Please. "Inherent value" is not a prerequisite for copyright protection. If you want to fart into a saxophone and call it music, you're entitled to the same protections as someone who spends eight years in a studio with a major label contract (see John Zorn for more details on saxophone farting). This is absolutely necessary for the little guy; imagine how much the big record labels would love to force the courts into evaluating copyright claims based on some tangible estimation of value (the only one I can think of is how much money the thing has made). They would be protected, and all the indies and basement studios would be vulnerable to massive infringement.
Also, as far as I am aware, TurnItIn.com is a for-profit company, and an honest argument could be made as to whether mere rule enforcement is an educational purpose. I don't see that it should be - the only possible way that TurnItIn could increase anyone's level of knowledge is implicitly, in that it will make them do work that they otherwise would have copied, and to my knowledge educational uses are usually required to actually be instructional. As such, I don't believe they can automatically skate by on fair use, at least not without a bit of argument. The one out that I do see is that they may be able to argue that students implicitly waive copyright claims against them by submitting the papers, but this gets a little tricky when it comes to public high school students - if you're at a public high school, you're essentially legally obligated to play by their rules, and I'm pretty sure that the school system is going out of bounds if it is coercing students to waive copyright protection on work that it is forcing them to do. Also, many teachers submit papers to the database without the consent of their students.
The fact is, this "service" is not a service to students, since the outcome of turning in a paper there is usually neutral and occasionally very negative. TurnItIn claims that it is a service to students, but generally speaking, students need no third party looking out for their IP rights - anyone that can get their hands on a paper that I wrote in high school or college must have gotten it from me, short of breaking into a teacher's closet and stealing it. If I've distributed a paper to someone along with the rights to put their name on it, then I as the copyright holder do not wish to have someone enforce my copyright. Paper mills are in the same boat. And paper mills may actually have a strong infringement claim against TurnItIn, in that TurnItIn actually strips their copyrighted product of its value by indexing the information. In the past, it has (sometimes) been upheld that copyright applies even to unpublished works because the right not to have your work published is enforcable, too; a similar protection may exist here, although IANAL. Anyhow, the only people TurnItIn directly helps are the teachers, and I suppose the content creators in the truly idiotic instances where students actually plagiarize something that they don't have the IP holder's permission to plagiarize.
That said, write your own f-ing papers, kids. If you're in high school, your paper assignments are so moronic that you've got to be stupid if you can't handle it yourself, and if you're in college, you're paying too much money for your education to piss it away by cheating.
With a name like "Omidyar Network," color me unsurprised that I've never heard of it before...
Google has name recognition and a good reputation. I foresee lots of support for this endeavor, and if they put as much effort into it as their words suggest they intend to, I think this will be a good thing for the world at large.
You can't separate a very specific piece of software from the underlying algorithms it has.
However, (and I guess that's the point you tried to make) I believe I can blame more the underlying algorithms in the MySQL engine than the ones in the webpages that use that particular engine.
Yes, I suppose I probably overstated when I said that computer science has nothing to do with specific software - of course a big part of being a good coder is understanding what tools are the best for your job. I think the main point I was trying to get across was just that you can't claim (as the uber-parent essentially did) that a coder would have been helped by more CS knowledge simply because he wrote some code that interfaced with a MySQL database. Yes, the truly thorough CS geek would dig into the source of MySQL and PostgreSQL to compare them, but let's be honest - this is a gargantuan task, and I think most employers would be more than a little pissed off if they gave the assignment "Make me a database to keep track of our customers" and the programmer spun wheels for three weeks sifting through the details of each algorithm in every SQL package out there to figure out which one has more efficient deadlock busting routines for their expected pattern of use. In any case, often the decision as to what engine to use does not lie remotely in the hands of the programmer - if your company has been using hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP connected up to a MySQL database for the past five years, chances are you'd need to break a hell of a lot of code and spend months to years to switch over to PostgreSQL, and I know what most bosses would say in response to that idea...
To put it another way, if it's got "SQL" in the name, I fault the creators of the software rather than the users if it does less than the SQL label implies...
As we see in so many MySQL web sites, as the waiters pile up, sooner or later you run out of MySQL connections and start to get error messages. IMHO, one of the reasons why the web is broken is that it is so easy to create content that no one takes the time to learn the basic computer science involved. When things break or perform poorly, they blame everyone but themselves.
The knowledge that MySQL craps out when you hit it with too much traffic has nothing to do with computer science, it is a quirk of one very specific piece of software. I don't think it's reasonable to blame a programmer for expecting a piece of software to do what it purports to do, or to expect them to divine that it won't perform well because they understand the underlying problem. Having only dealt a tiny bit with MySQL, I did not know up until reading the comments on this article that it handled this stuff so badly - I understand the nature of the problems involved, but I assumed that they were dealt with. I don't think this speaks at all to my understanding of computer science, although it may belie the fact that I don't eat, sleep, and breathe SQL.
Besides, if a program you write for a thousand users doesn't work very well, I'd blame you, not the user; similarly, if a programming language doesn't work very well for thousand programmers, I'd blame the people who made the language, not the programmers forced to use it.
For reasons I do not entirely understand, it is assumed that the majority of particles captured will be the anti-particle, thus adding a negative amount of mass to the black hole. The companion particle will then be observed as radiation that appears to come from the vicinity of the black hole.
Not exactly - antiparticles have positive mass, just like regular particles, and the amount of particles and antiparticles captured by the hole is equal (you should be able to swap the two and end up with the same exact theory - the fact that our universe is mostly matter and not antimatter is a bit confusing, as all our generally accepted theories treat the two on equal footing). The net change in mass is due to the fact that when an antiparticle-particle pair is created from the vacuum, it usually only exists over a very short time before annihilating to result in zero net change in mass; the time it can exist for is loosely related to the uncertainty principle (although in quantum field theory, you can't really use the original uncertainty principle as stated). However, in the vicinity of a black hole, one of the particles can be "sucked in" before it has a chance to annihilate with the other, so both particles become "real" as opposed to virtual; by conservation of energy, since the outgoing particle now has positive mass (or to be more precise, positive energy, as some particles are massless), we play a bookkeeping trick and say that the ingoing one must have negative mass/energy.
We then assume that if this energy came from somewhere, it must have come from the gravitational field (there's not much else to play with, after all, in an empty spacetime with a black hole!). Note, however, that the mechanics of this transfer are not specified by Hawking's theory - all that he says is essentially that the "empty" quantum field scatters off of a black hole in such a way as to lead to quantum field energy flowing off to infinity. It makes a lot more sense if you accept the fact that "empty" space is really vibrating this way and that like crazy - generally you can't extract anything useful from this, because it's uniformly violent, but at the boundary of a black hole, our usual definition of empty space turns out to be wrong (not to oversimplify or anything...), so there is actually an outward flow of energy.
But I don't think we'll really have a handle on this until quantum gravity is solved - after all, Hawking calculated using quantum field theory on a classical spacetime, so really any energy flow is coming straight out of the quantum field; it's an assumption that there will be a corresponding reaction between the quantum (electromagnetic) field and the gravitational field that will actually reduce the mass and event horizon of the black hole, but the nature of this reaction is unknown. It's also unclear exactly what an event horizon will look like quantum mechanically - up until now, all quantum theories have been on prespecified spacetimes, so it's a little weird to use them to talk about spacetime itself.
I should note that this particle-antiparticle on the horizon picture of this effect is kind of a sleight of hand; to my knowledge, nobody has ever performed the relevant calculation in position space, and besides, at the quantum level, it means very little to talk about a particle "doing" anything, since in QFT a single particle is an extreme and unrealizable case. But the intuition is pretty much right on.
This is what we get for living in a world where 1 + 2 + 3 +... = -1/12...
What we have is not an issue of competition crushing innovation; rather, it is the lack of competition in the OS field that has left Microsoft with the energy to expand into new sectors and use Windows to help it crush competitors elsewhere. If there had been a stronger operating system to challenge Windows all these years, MS would have had to substantially improve their product with each iteration rather than merely fix the heinous bugs left in the prior installment. Instead they have done nothing but tread water for the past 10 years, complacent in their domination of the OS market.
And don't anybody give me this crap about Linux being a strong competitor to Windows! Don't get me wrong - I love my Ubuntu, but the day that Linux becomes a competitor to Windows will be the day that Linux actually refers to a single operating system rather than a mess of crappy forks. Take a lesson from Firefox: open source projects thrive when there is a clear winner. A monopoly may be a bad thing in commercial development, but in open source it is actually somewhat desirable, as it means less duplicated effort. Nobody is going to develop non open-source software for an operating system that is merely one distro among a thousand. And until commercial applications are widely available for an OS, it can never be a competitor to Windows. Choice isn't bad, but unfortunately having too much of it limits adoption and interoperability. [/rant]
Back on topic: regarding speech recognition, I don't think it has much of a place in an operating system, anyways, at least today. It's a cute trick, but really, until some form of semi-strong AI is achieved, speech recognition is going to be a tough nut to crack. Humans use contextual clues to decipher what we hear, and they are very important - a computer will only be able to perform robust speech recognition when it can tell whether its attempted translation actually means anything or not, and this is a long way off. Here's hoping I see the day...
I just looked at the GNUPlot page, and regardless of what anyone else says, I don't think it should be too difficult to code at all, at least the grid stuff like near the top of that page. The reason - it's all drawn without perspective, which means a little vector math tells you where to put each point. You might be a bit foolish to try to hand-code something substantial with perspective, but orthogonal projections are straightforward.
Here's what you need to do. First, figure out what a unit in the X, Y, and Z axes corresponds to in screen coordinates. In the examples on the GNUPlot page, I'd estimate that a unit in the X direction is about 10 pixels to the right and 2 pixels down in screen coordinates, or (10, -2). Similarly, a unit in the Y direction is about (3, 3), and a unit in the Z direction is (0, 1). Now, to find the screen location of a point given in 3D, say (x,y,z), we start at the screen coordinate of the origin (wherever you want to put (0,0,0)). To this, we add x times the vector (10, -2), y times the vector (3, 3), and z times the vector (0, 1). For example, the point (10, 3, 6), with an origin at (100, 100), would show up at (100, 100) + (100, -20) + (9, 9) + (0, 6) = (209, 95).
In other words, if we call the unit vectors in the X, Y and Z directions (given in screen coordinates) Xhat, Yhat, and Zhat, then the point (x,y,z) should be plotted at (origin + x*Xhat+y*Yhat+z*Zhat).
I presume that from here you should be able to figure out how to draw the grid lines - just sample a bunch of points, and draw straight lines between neighbors. If you want to fill in the tiles (like the pictures near the bottom of the GNUPlot page), you'll need to be clever about the order you fill them in so that the ones in front are filled last. For this, you can sort the tiles by the appropriate combination of x and y coordinates (in "real" space, not screen space) - in our example, Xhat - 3.333Yhat points straight down, so you would sort by the combination x - 3.333y and draw in that order.
This should at least get you on your way. I'm sure there are subtleties to consider, but hey - it's your project, not mine, so I'll leave it at that!
...at this rate it will take about 166 years to get your investment back in earned value.
Only if you assume that Google sends back 100% of their earnings to the shareholders - as I recall, it's generally a bad sign if a company is paying out everything it takes in, and the ideal situation is more like 50%. I don't know what Google does, but in any case, I get your point.
However, pricing on tech stocks (in particular) has always been more about capitalizing on fear, greed, and hype as they pump up and drag down the stock price than about any sort of reasonable analysis. Everyone knows that everyone else is irrational (and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc.), so it's quite difficult to assign any sort of "value" to normal stocks, let alone public sweethearts like Google. You're just irrationally speculating on other people's irrationality in the hopes that it's the most rational move to make. You'll probably recall that before the IPO a lot of people were screaming that $100/share was way too high for a company with so little potential for further growth. It appears they were wrong, clearly. Is $400 too high now? Who knows...all I know is I don't have the money to be playing these kinds of games with it!
Besides, how many stock traders do you know that got rich sitting on a basket of stocks and watching the dividends trickle in?
You forget Sega, although they dont make consoles anymore they had alot of inovative ideas. The motion sensing controller, almost identical to the one Nintendo has made was done first on Dreamcast but never released.
I'm not going to say that Sega did not innovate at all - certainly they put on a real good show back in the day. But let's be honest here. There's nothing innovative about the design of the Wii's controller, and Sega was certainly not the first company to think of something similar. Technologically minded musicians and "performance artists" (whatever that means) have been building stuff like this for decades, always saying it's the "next big thing" and other garbage like that.
What is truly innovative about the Wii-mote is that Nintendo has the balls to actually make a go at selling millions of these things, whereas everyone else thought it was too much of a gamble. And I do think that's quite an accomplishment, although as I understand it Nintendo can afford to gamble far more than its competitors can at the moment, so it was probably a little easier to convince the suits to go along with it there than it would be at MS or Sony...
Whether or not the Sony Blu-Ray devices work/come out/cost a fortune, why the hell are they trying to force another video standard on us when half of our TVs can't even do justice to the picture quality on DVDs? What's the problem with DVDs anyhow? Switching away from magnetic tape was one thing, because it had noticeably inferior picture compared to cable and degraded rather quickly over time, but I think (hope) this attempt to get us to switch to Blu-Ray may meet with about the same level of success as LaserDisc.
I for one will save my money, thank you very much. And while we're on it, forget the PS3! The only reason I ever bought a PS2 in the first place was for Katamari Damacy; as much as I love that game, next time I'll probably go without unless they switch the series to the Wii. I think the events of the past six months or so may go down as the start of a long string of mistakes that killed Sony for good.
Now, if, for example, someone were to write a simple program that called wgatray.exe in an infinite loop and had a few hundred thousand people running it, then Microsoft would wind up on the end of a DoS attack.
The particularly amusing part about this would be the following: as I understand things, Microsoft has failed to report to the end user that this piece of software phones home. This means that if a user ran the program a million times in a row, they could plausibly claim that they had no way of knowing they were even participating in a DOS attack should the Feds come a-knocking! They were simply running a program on their home PC that claimed to be network-silent (although I'm not entirely sure whether or not the EULA admits to making any connection at all...if it does, you'd be screwed). Hence Microsoft's own shenanigans would bite it in the ass.
Not that I'd ever do such a thing myself or suggest it to others, of course, seeing as I've just gone on the record admitting knowledge to the spyware activity of the program.
Some of your most important visitors are blind. Or do you think the Googlebot has eyes?
Certainly this is true - I'm most definitely not arguing that sites shouldn't make every effort to get their information across even if all one sees is the text. Using images and Flash to convey textual information is just downright wrong. Tables don't seem that bad to me - Googlebot seems to handle them fine, as far as I can tell, and I don't really understand why screen readers would have such trouble. In any case, though, striving for accessibility should not mean that we punt on the issue of making layout easier. The hardcore CSS folks seem to think that everyone else is either stupid or lazy, but that's a bit unfair, and I think it places the blame in the wrong place.
Yes, you can do beautiful and complex layouts in CSS. You could also program the next version of Firefox in Assembly. [I'm aware that's a bad analogy - I'm too tired to come up with a better one] That doesn't mean that there's not a better tool for the job, or that lacking one, a better tool shouldn't be developed. A lot of people don't dig CSS for layout, period (personally, I don't know enough to stake a claim either way). That speaks to a failing of CSS, so we should be seeking a solution rather than arguing that we already have it.
It's a bad idea because the "page layout" would only be useful for one audience, probably sighted iusers.
Kind of like how CSS information is only useful for the sighted users? I don't get the difference (okay, I know you can specify the tone of voice of the screen reader in CSS, but this is hardly vital...).
I'm clearly asking for trouble with this, but I'm going to say it anyway. One of the most common arguments I've heard in favor of accepting CSS as the cure-all of website design is that it if you use tables instead, blind people will be inconvenienced by your site. Not to be insensitive, as I'm all for making things available to all (don't use Flash, etc.), but how many of your visitors are actually blind? The parent's quote suggests that sighted people are a negligible group, certainly not worth developing web standards around, but personally, the only browsers that I see showing up in my server logs are FF, IE, and Safari. Why is it that we should not make layout as easy as possible?
The way I see it (disclaimer: I'm a relative newbie to this - I've only been back into this stuff for a year or so, having gotten out of the whole web-design thing during the dotcom bust), CSS's biggest weakness is that it takes a lot of hackwork to achieve designs that seem like they should be quite simple intuitively - I fully understand why people often just give up and resort to either tables or absolute positioning. CSS acts very much like a formatting tool rather than a layout tool, and the layout stuff feels shoehorned in. The grandparent's comment seems quite reasonable (that layout should be separated from formatting), and much more OO than the current state of affairs. One class, one task, right?
Lastly, I can't resist, I've got to say it, even if it's not related to the parent: if browsers for the blind are stupid enough to read the blank entries in tables, then we should be going after the people that make those browsers, not the people who use tables in their designs!
Point taken, although I certainly didn't mean to suggest that we whimper and die. And I have nothing but the utmost respect for academics, especially principled ones - furthermore, I agree wholeheartedly with most of what Lessig says. I just meant to point out that this article is nothing but an opinion. Even if it's a good opinion, there are many blanks that need to be filled in. What I'd rather see is a glimmer of an indication that some sanity can be brought to this IP situation. Right now it is entirely off the radar to everyone on both sides of the political spectrum (/. is but a highly distorted cross section of the real world, as we'd all be wise to remember once in a while).
Many laws have remained on the books for a long time that conflict with the Constitution and its principles, usually because there is not enough of a public outcry against them. I don't want to see that happen with copyright laws, but history does have a way of repeating itself. If anyone took my earlier post as a plea to "ignore this guy," please put the thought out of your head. Help him out - try to spread awareness of the issue and get people who don't read Slashdot pissed off about this stuff, too!
Really, now...while I feel the creative landscape would be a much brighter place if copyrights didn't last indefinitely, I don't see Lessig proposing any real plan here. 14 years renewable to 28 sounds fair to me, but I'm part of the choir in this situation, and I don't see any indication that our lawmakers are going to be receptive to this. To my knowledge, one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe, and nothing is changing there.
There are billion dollar interests at stake here. I'm glad that there are academics like Lessig that want to stand up for their principles, but unless he's planning to raise the funds for a massive lobbying campaign, I think he's fighting a losing battle...
The most realistic part is definitely the bit about requiring people to register for copyrights, but I worry about this - if you need to register, chances are you'll need to pay. Even if it's just a little, I'm not in favor of giving the government more knobs to turn...I fear that this particular step would only further help the moneyed interests at the expense of the little guy.
Capping liability at the purchase price is a good idea, as it's essentially just removing the ability to gain by producing crap software.
But really, is there any reasonable way to legally define what would qualify as a "bug" in a piece of software? There is already quite a bit of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" going on as things stand now - who's to say that if something like this article proposes came about, companies would not just release their unfixed bugs list as "features" and shield themselves from trouble that way?
I also have trouble envisioning a fair legal line emerging that would determine whether a bug was bad enough to warrant action. Should I be able to sue Microsoft because their software is bloated and slow, or would this only apply to things like security breaches? If my spreadsheet calculation overflows and gives me the wrong answer, is that actionable or should I have known better as a user? So many lines to draw...
Seems too complicated to make something like this fair to me, and I'm somewhat technically literate. Just imagine how useless a law like this would turn out after our friends in Congress got their stink all over it.
I'm with linvir on the not paying the squatters the outrageous fees they're asking; unfortunately, I fear that enough domains are successfully sold for their asking prices to keep these people in business. At ~$10/year for registration, and $1000 asking price, you only need to sell one out of a hundred domains to break even. Push the asking price higher (and from what I've seen, most of them seem to be asking more to the tune of $5k), and you need an even tinier percentage of sales.
Here's a question, although I'm not sure if anyone has the answer: what percentage of registered domain names are parked for domain name speculators as opposed to containing legitimate content? I don't know any good way to check this automatically, as many of the parked pages have BS content on them that is recognizable as such to a human but wouldn't be easy to figure out automatically. But it would be interesting to know, for instance, what percentage of [dictionary word].coms are simply being sat on. From my checking of domains that I would want to use, it seems that somewhere around 95% of the names that are taken (that I would want) have no real content up, just a "Click here to buy this domain name" link and a crapload of ads.
I imagine more people would be accessing sites directly instead of relying solely on the search engines if more of the good names were actually being used. Not that there's any feasible way to bring that about...while it may go against our collective sense of Internet morality, I can't for the life of me think of a reason why domain speculation should be illegal.
Considering MS has pretty much said they intend to kill Google as the dominant search engine, the competition is pretty obvious. Though to be more specific it's really more like MSN vs Google competing for web supremacy.
Ever since I saw question #5 on the Google Labs Aptitude Test, "What's wrong with Unix? How would you fix it?", I've always wondered if Google was working on an OS of their own on the sly. If I was Microsoft, I'd be extremely worried about this prospect, since pretty much every Google offering has randomly appeared on the Google Labs site, for the most part with very little fanfare.
Not to say that it is or is not likely (that's a question I'm in no position to answer), but imagine what it would do to MS if a free Google-flavored Linux distro popped up without warning two weeks before Vista shipped? If there's one company out there that could/would concievably try to make such a thing and get it idiot-proof enough to let the average non-tech person use it effectively (this isn't a bait, but none of the current distributions are there, yet), it's Google. And I think the company has enough goodwill stored up (not to mention the media darling status it has attained) that people would actually pay attention to it and give it a try, even if it was bundled with Google Pack or some other way for Google to monetize. Needless to say, this would all but cement Linux as the operating system of choice for the concievable future, since there would finally be an incentive for everyone to create Linux versions of their programs instead of (or along with) Mac and Windows ones if a reasonable percentage of people were using it.
So if I was Bill Gates, I'd be wetting myself over the Google problem. It's not that Google has indicated any desire to destroy Microsoft, it's that they would stand a fighting chance if they decided to give it a go. No company has ever had that power before, so it's quite rational that MS wants to squash them before the tables turn.
If the school district imposes relevant requirements (such as a physical exam prior to joining a sports team) in order to allow kids to participate that's fair. However, when it comes to unrelated out of school requirements that's the slippery slope. If this policy is acceptable because you consider extracurriculars to be a privilege then at what point do you draw the line?
Let there be no doubt - by no means was I trying to say that I think that either a) this policy is acceptable, or b) that extracurriculars are a privilege. I firmly disagree with both statements. You make an excellent point, that since everyone is charged for these activities, they should be just as protected as education itself.
However, as to the slippery slope, my point was that we are already halfway down it, and that's what concerns me. You mention that it's fair to impose relevant requirements, and the example of sports is quite appropriate. It was a long time ago that it was decided that random drug testing of athletes was perfectly constitutional, on the argument that it was relevant - we don't want kids getting hurt because teammates are high or anything like that. Later on this was pushed further, and random drug testing was imposed in some schools on people doing non-athletic extracurriculars. The argument became "success in extracurriculars requires healthy students, and healthy students don't take drugs." Whether or not you agree that the state has a vested interest in keeping kids off of drugs, it's one thing to drug test unwilling kids to make sure they don't hurt each other; it's quite another to force tests upon non-consenting students engaging in non-athletic activities where they run no risk of physical injury.
Regarding this article, I feel that the situation is even more questionable than the drug-testing one, because it could be at least be argued that a school is obligated do everything in its power to keep kids off of drugs. What this school system is trying to do is literally make speech outside of school punishable, without clearly defining what types of speech it will punish - the paranoid will assume that this is deliberate so that they can decide after the fact. Whether or not this is the case, the restriction is far more onerous than the drug testing (drugs can only be detected for a few weeks - how long do you imagine the average MySpace blog is available? Ever tried to get every search engine out there to un-cache a site?), and if this stands, I fear what will come next for our students.
My advice to anyone faced with a school-imposed requirement like this? Evaluate whether retaining the right to say/do what you like outside of school hours is vitally important to you. If you're reading Slashdot, chances are you're smart enough to not ever say anything online that will get you in trouble, so keep in mind that you can probably just sign the agreement and forget about it forever. If the idea of it still really bothers you, though, go ahead and tell the school system that you won't play their dirty game. Accept that you will not be able to participate in extracurricular activities, but demand that the school include in your permanent record (and send off to colleges when you apply) a letter explaining that the school system itself specifically barred you from participating - this is important, and I don't believe it is an unreasonable request. Find a sympathetic teacher (I guarantee there are a few in your school that are as appalled by this whole thing as you are) that will write a glowing letter in praise of your decision to stand up for your ideals. Get an after school job, volunteer, teach SAT classes, do something with your time to show the colleges that you're not just lazy, and you'll probably come out of it fine.
Or just sign the damn thing. I mean, they've got you by the balls anyway, and in a couple years, you'll be free in the (more or less) true sense of the word. Sucks to be a kid...
While this action quite reasonably offends our sense of liberty and free speech, it is certainly not unprecedented. The fact that students are forced to sign this agreement in order to participate in extracurricular activities is what makes this likely to stand up to scrutiny unless a serious public outcry arises. A choice is given, and as long as students are willing to give up the privilege of participating in extracurriculars (which are not guaranteed/forced on them, unlike education), they are free not to be bound by this agreement.
Schools have been using this gimmick to coerce students into submitting to drug tests for many years now, and as far as I know, it has not been ruled unfair. Not that I support either of these things, as the ultimate effect is to force any student that wants to go to college to either sign the agreement or make up a lot of bogus extracurriculars, but I'm not sure that there's any solid legal argument against it, and there may even be some precedent in its favor.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about the original comments, but if you're curious to hear some of the aftermath, this link has a lot about what actually happened. The offending accusations appear to have something to do with (allegedly - don't sue me!) the plaintiff referring at-risk teens to a the Whitmore Academy, a youth center that (again, allegedly, although in this case charges were brought and the owner plead no contest - draw your own conclusion) had a history of abuse. In return for these referrals, it seems that the plaintiff was paid some money, and the woman accused of defaming her was real pissed off about this. At least that's what it looks like - the message board is a lot of arguing back and forth, and I frankly don't have the time to sift through it right now. In any case, though, it doesn't look like the original statements were altogether without merit to me...too bad they didn't actually fight it out in court, might have been a more reasonable outcome.
I fear the joke was lost on the crowd...
I'm astounded that given the accusations and evidence that this may have actually happened, you refuse to believe that it's possible! Point by point:
1) I can't speak to Diebold's willingness to fix an election, but you are vastly overestimating the risk involved. The whole company is not at stake here - more likely, if some vote tampering were discovered, it would "come to light" that a single rogue coder inserted the offending code into a routine security patch. This guy alone would take the fall for the bulk of it, that is, assuming rock-solid evidence (it would probably take a copy of the actual offending source code, since all other evidence of foul play evaporates in to the papertrail-less void) ever came to light. I believe people have already shown how easy it is to write a self-deleting virus that would remove all evidence of itself as soon as it did its work. (it's easy enough to make something get rid of every trace of itself even in a bloated mess like Windows; it's child's play when your company controls the design, security, and handling of the operating system, hardware, and software at every step along the way). If I had to guess, I would say that we're talking well under a 1% chance of discovery if most of the knowledge of details was confined to the top tier of the company. Even supposing this was discovered, after offering up a patsy, the company would probably just lose its voting machine business and continue as usual with its other stuff. Diebold was getting along fine before getting into the voting biz, they'll do fine if they're kicked out of it, too. Depending on the price, it could well be a very profitable (risk vs. rewards-wise) decision to throw an election to the highest bidder.
2) I'll agree, I don't know how easy it would be to get coders inside the company to knowingly agree to this level of risk. More than that, I would worry about the possibility of the involved coders leaking the fact that they did this so as to push responsibility up the chain if it looked like evidence was mounting against them. If I was to run such a scheme, I'd make sure to go outside the company for this bit, possibly by going to whoever wanted to buy the election to find someone that they trusted - anyone scummy enough to buy an election knows where to go for something like this. It would be easy enough for a high level Diebold exec to obtain API details to hand over, and any knowledgeable programmer could figure out what to do with them in a little time for the right price. Also, it's possible that the specs for the vote-shifting code could be phrased in such a way that the programmer didn't even realize what they were doing - I don't know how Diebold's software works, so I can't really comment any more on that. One easy way would be to ask a programmer to do a security audit, and prove any flaws by writing exploits for them. They hand over the info happily, assuming the flaws will be fixed, only to have them abused instead.
3) From the article, it appears that the people who installed most of the Diebold patches had no idea what was on them, so probably wouldn't face much exposure. And they did agree to install them, despite being suspicious about what was on them, so I think that point is proven - if given a malicious patch, they would install it.
4) This has been thoroughly addressed before - in some cases, all it takes is altering a single machine a local election result. Even for a national election, the margins are so small these days that a few thousand votes here and there really can shift
The next step in evolution (the evolution of evolution, if you will) is for the process itself to enjoy the fruits of its own labor, in other words for intelligence to figure out how to create smarter intelligence. I assume you can see where it goes from there - the growth goes super-exponential, and intelligence figures out how to optimize the process of optimizing intelligence, and so on. If you model this mathematically, you will end up with a divergence at some point, assuming there are no hard theoretical limits on the speed of computation. This is the basis of Kurzweil and other futurists claims that eventually humans won't even be able to comprehend the pace of changes that are coming.
Of course, this is all speculation until we actually make a computer program that can intelligently improve its own design. We're near the cusp of this thing evolutionarily, and at the moment it's unclear whether we're far enough over the hump to create something that may be able to smack us down before we destroy ourselves with our ridiculous infighting.
On that note, people always seem to be worried that computers are going to destroy or enslave us. To me, this gives us far too much credit. If this strong AI thing happens, the far likelier possibility is that the computers will just decide that we're irrelevant, or perhaps a minor nuisance. Humans may be pretty important to humans, but when it comes right down to it, we're just another boring branch on the tree of life. That is, unless we kill ourselves before we get there. Then we're just damn stupid, and a damn waste of billions of years of random walk style optimization.
Also, as far as I am aware, TurnItIn.com is a for-profit company, and an honest argument could be made as to whether mere rule enforcement is an educational purpose. I don't see that it should be - the only possible way that TurnItIn could increase anyone's level of knowledge is implicitly, in that it will make them do work that they otherwise would have copied, and to my knowledge educational uses are usually required to actually be instructional. As such, I don't believe they can automatically skate by on fair use, at least not without a bit of argument. The one out that I do see is that they may be able to argue that students implicitly waive copyright claims against them by submitting the papers, but this gets a little tricky when it comes to public high school students - if you're at a public high school, you're essentially legally obligated to play by their rules, and I'm pretty sure that the school system is going out of bounds if it is coercing students to waive copyright protection on work that it is forcing them to do. Also, many teachers submit papers to the database without the consent of their students.
The fact is, this "service" is not a service to students, since the outcome of turning in a paper there is usually neutral and occasionally very negative. TurnItIn claims that it is a service to students, but generally speaking, students need no third party looking out for their IP rights - anyone that can get their hands on a paper that I wrote in high school or college must have gotten it from me, short of breaking into a teacher's closet and stealing it. If I've distributed a paper to someone along with the rights to put their name on it, then I as the copyright holder do not wish to have someone enforce my copyright. Paper mills are in the same boat. And paper mills may actually have a strong infringement claim against TurnItIn, in that TurnItIn actually strips their copyrighted product of its value by indexing the information. In the past, it has (sometimes) been upheld that copyright applies even to unpublished works because the right not to have your work published is enforcable, too; a similar protection may exist here, although IANAL. Anyhow, the only people TurnItIn directly helps are the teachers, and I suppose the content creators in the truly idiotic instances where students actually plagiarize something that they don't have the IP holder's permission to plagiarize.
That said, write your own f-ing papers, kids. If you're in high school, your paper assignments are so moronic that you've got to be stupid if you can't handle it yourself, and if you're in college, you're paying too much money for your education to piss it away by cheating.
With a name like "Omidyar Network," color me unsurprised that I've never heard of it before...
Google has name recognition and a good reputation. I foresee lots of support for this endeavor, and if they put as much effort into it as their words suggest they intend to, I think this will be a good thing for the world at large.
To put it another way, if it's got "SQL" in the name, I fault the creators of the software rather than the users if it does less than the SQL label implies...
Besides, if a program you write for a thousand users doesn't work very well, I'd blame you, not the user; similarly, if a programming language doesn't work very well for thousand programmers, I'd blame the people who made the language, not the programmers forced to use it.
Not exactly - antiparticles have positive mass, just like regular particles, and the amount of particles and antiparticles captured by the hole is equal (you should be able to swap the two and end up with the same exact theory - the fact that our universe is mostly matter and not antimatter is a bit confusing, as all our generally accepted theories treat the two on equal footing). The net change in mass is due to the fact that when an antiparticle-particle pair is created from the vacuum, it usually only exists over a very short time before annihilating to result in zero net change in mass; the time it can exist for is loosely related to the uncertainty principle (although in quantum field theory, you can't really use the original uncertainty principle as stated). However, in the vicinity of a black hole, one of the particles can be "sucked in" before it has a chance to annihilate with the other, so both particles become "real" as opposed to virtual; by conservation of energy, since the outgoing particle now has positive mass (or to be more precise, positive energy, as some particles are massless), we play a bookkeeping trick and say that the ingoing one must have negative mass/energy.
We then assume that if this energy came from somewhere, it must have come from the gravitational field (there's not much else to play with, after all, in an empty spacetime with a black hole!). Note, however, that the mechanics of this transfer are not specified by Hawking's theory - all that he says is essentially that the "empty" quantum field scatters off of a black hole in such a way as to lead to quantum field energy flowing off to infinity. It makes a lot more sense if you accept the fact that "empty" space is really vibrating this way and that like crazy - generally you can't extract anything useful from this, because it's uniformly violent, but at the boundary of a black hole, our usual definition of empty space turns out to be wrong (not to oversimplify or anything...), so there is actually an outward flow of energy.
But I don't think we'll really have a handle on this until quantum gravity is solved - after all, Hawking calculated using quantum field theory on a classical spacetime, so really any energy flow is coming straight out of the quantum field; it's an assumption that there will be a corresponding reaction between the quantum (electromagnetic) field and the gravitational field that will actually reduce the mass and event horizon of the black hole, but the nature of this reaction is unknown. It's also unclear exactly what an event horizon will look like quantum mechanically - up until now, all quantum theories have been on prespecified spacetimes, so it's a little weird to use them to talk about spacetime itself.
I should note that this particle-antiparticle on the horizon picture of this effect is kind of a sleight of hand; to my knowledge, nobody has ever performed the relevant calculation in position space, and besides, at the quantum level, it means very little to talk about a particle "doing" anything, since in QFT a single particle is an extreme and unrealizable case. But the intuition is pretty much right on.
This is what we get for living in a world where 1 + 2 + 3 +
What we have is not an issue of competition crushing innovation; rather, it is the lack of competition in the OS field that has left Microsoft with the energy to expand into new sectors and use Windows to help it crush competitors elsewhere. If there had been a stronger operating system to challenge Windows all these years, MS would have had to substantially improve their product with each iteration rather than merely fix the heinous bugs left in the prior installment. Instead they have done nothing but tread water for the past 10 years, complacent in their domination of the OS market.
And don't anybody give me this crap about Linux being a strong competitor to Windows! Don't get me wrong - I love my Ubuntu, but the day that Linux becomes a competitor to Windows will be the day that Linux actually refers to a single operating system rather than a mess of crappy forks. Take a lesson from Firefox: open source projects thrive when there is a clear winner. A monopoly may be a bad thing in commercial development, but in open source it is actually somewhat desirable, as it means less duplicated effort. Nobody is going to develop non open-source software for an operating system that is merely one distro among a thousand. And until commercial applications are widely available for an OS, it can never be a competitor to Windows. Choice isn't bad, but unfortunately having too much of it limits adoption and interoperability. [/rant]
Back on topic: regarding speech recognition, I don't think it has much of a place in an operating system, anyways, at least today. It's a cute trick, but really, until some form of semi-strong AI is achieved, speech recognition is going to be a tough nut to crack. Humans use contextual clues to decipher what we hear, and they are very important - a computer will only be able to perform robust speech recognition when it can tell whether its attempted translation actually means anything or not, and this is a long way off. Here's hoping I see the day...
I just looked at the GNUPlot page, and regardless of what anyone else says, I don't think it should be too difficult to code at all, at least the grid stuff like near the top of that page. The reason - it's all drawn without perspective, which means a little vector math tells you where to put each point. You might be a bit foolish to try to hand-code something substantial with perspective, but orthogonal projections are straightforward.
Here's what you need to do. First, figure out what a unit in the X, Y, and Z axes corresponds to in screen coordinates. In the examples on the GNUPlot page, I'd estimate that a unit in the X direction is about 10 pixels to the right and 2 pixels down in screen coordinates, or (10, -2). Similarly, a unit in the Y direction is about (3, 3), and a unit in the Z direction is (0, 1). Now, to find the screen location of a point given in 3D, say (x,y,z), we start at the screen coordinate of the origin (wherever you want to put (0,0,0)). To this, we add x times the vector (10, -2), y times the vector (3, 3), and z times the vector (0, 1). For example, the point (10, 3, 6), with an origin at (100, 100), would show up at (100, 100) + (100, -20) + (9, 9) + (0, 6) = (209, 95).
In other words, if we call the unit vectors in the X, Y and Z directions (given in screen coordinates) Xhat, Yhat, and Zhat, then the point (x,y,z) should be plotted at (origin + x*Xhat+y*Yhat+z*Zhat).
I presume that from here you should be able to figure out how to draw the grid lines - just sample a bunch of points, and draw straight lines between neighbors. If you want to fill in the tiles (like the pictures near the bottom of the GNUPlot page), you'll need to be clever about the order you fill them in so that the ones in front are filled last. For this, you can sort the tiles by the appropriate combination of x and y coordinates (in "real" space, not screen space) - in our example, Xhat - 3.333Yhat points straight down, so you would sort by the combination x - 3.333y and draw in that order.
This should at least get you on your way. I'm sure there are subtleties to consider, but hey - it's your project, not mine, so I'll leave it at that!
However, pricing on tech stocks (in particular) has always been more about capitalizing on fear, greed, and hype as they pump up and drag down the stock price than about any sort of reasonable analysis. Everyone knows that everyone else is irrational (and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc.), so it's quite difficult to assign any sort of "value" to normal stocks, let alone public sweethearts like Google. You're just irrationally speculating on other people's irrationality in the hopes that it's the most rational move to make. You'll probably recall that before the IPO a lot of people were screaming that $100/share was way too high for a company with so little potential for further growth. It appears they were wrong, clearly. Is $400 too high now? Who knows...all I know is I don't have the money to be playing these kinds of games with it!
Besides, how many stock traders do you know that got rich sitting on a basket of stocks and watching the dividends trickle in?
What is truly innovative about the Wii-mote is that Nintendo has the balls to actually make a go at selling millions of these things, whereas everyone else thought it was too much of a gamble. And I do think that's quite an accomplishment, although as I understand it Nintendo can afford to gamble far more than its competitors can at the moment, so it was probably a little easier to convince the suits to go along with it there than it would be at MS or Sony...
Whether or not the Sony Blu-Ray devices work/come out/cost a fortune, why the hell are they trying to force another video standard on us when half of our TVs can't even do justice to the picture quality on DVDs? What's the problem with DVDs anyhow? Switching away from magnetic tape was one thing, because it had noticeably inferior picture compared to cable and degraded rather quickly over time, but I think (hope) this attempt to get us to switch to Blu-Ray may meet with about the same level of success as LaserDisc.
I for one will save my money, thank you very much. And while we're on it, forget the PS3! The only reason I ever bought a PS2 in the first place was for Katamari Damacy; as much as I love that game, next time I'll probably go without unless they switch the series to the Wii. I think the events of the past six months or so may go down as the start of a long string of mistakes that killed Sony for good.
Not that I'd ever do such a thing myself or suggest it to others, of course, seeing as I've just gone on the record admitting knowledge to the spyware activity of the program.
Yes, you can do beautiful and complex layouts in CSS. You could also program the next version of Firefox in Assembly. [I'm aware that's a bad analogy - I'm too tired to come up with a better one] That doesn't mean that there's not a better tool for the job, or that lacking one, a better tool shouldn't be developed. A lot of people don't dig CSS for layout, period (personally, I don't know enough to stake a claim either way). That speaks to a failing of CSS, so we should be seeking a solution rather than arguing that we already have it.
I'm clearly asking for trouble with this, but I'm going to say it anyway. One of the most common arguments I've heard in favor of accepting CSS as the cure-all of website design is that it if you use tables instead, blind people will be inconvenienced by your site. Not to be insensitive, as I'm all for making things available to all (don't use Flash, etc.), but how many of your visitors are actually blind? The parent's quote suggests that sighted people are a negligible group, certainly not worth developing web standards around, but personally, the only browsers that I see showing up in my server logs are FF, IE, and Safari. Why is it that we should not make layout as easy as possible?
The way I see it (disclaimer: I'm a relative newbie to this - I've only been back into this stuff for a year or so, having gotten out of the whole web-design thing during the dotcom bust), CSS's biggest weakness is that it takes a lot of hackwork to achieve designs that seem like they should be quite simple intuitively - I fully understand why people often just give up and resort to either tables or absolute positioning. CSS acts very much like a formatting tool rather than a layout tool, and the layout stuff feels shoehorned in. The grandparent's comment seems quite reasonable (that layout should be separated from formatting), and much more OO than the current state of affairs. One class, one task, right?
Lastly, I can't resist, I've got to say it, even if it's not related to the parent: if browsers for the blind are stupid enough to read the blank entries in tables, then we should be going after the people that make those browsers, not the people who use tables in their designs!
Point taken, although I certainly didn't mean to suggest that we whimper and die. And I have nothing but the utmost respect for academics, especially principled ones - furthermore, I agree wholeheartedly with most of what Lessig says. I just meant to point out that this article is nothing but an opinion. Even if it's a good opinion, there are many blanks that need to be filled in. What I'd rather see is a glimmer of an indication that some sanity can be brought to this IP situation. Right now it is entirely off the radar to everyone on both sides of the political spectrum (/. is but a highly distorted cross section of the real world, as we'd all be wise to remember once in a while).
Many laws have remained on the books for a long time that conflict with the Constitution and its principles, usually because there is not enough of a public outcry against them. I don't want to see that happen with copyright laws, but history does have a way of repeating itself. If anyone took my earlier post as a plea to "ignore this guy," please put the thought out of your head. Help him out - try to spread awareness of the issue and get people who don't read Slashdot pissed off about this stuff, too!
Really, now...while I feel the creative landscape would be a much brighter place if copyrights didn't last indefinitely, I don't see Lessig proposing any real plan here. 14 years renewable to 28 sounds fair to me, but I'm part of the choir in this situation, and I don't see any indication that our lawmakers are going to be receptive to this. To my knowledge, one of the major reasons for the lengthening of copyright terms in the US is that we needed to bring our laws in line with the copyright laws in Europe, and nothing is changing there.
There are billion dollar interests at stake here. I'm glad that there are academics like Lessig that want to stand up for their principles, but unless he's planning to raise the funds for a massive lobbying campaign, I think he's fighting a losing battle...
The most realistic part is definitely the bit about requiring people to register for copyrights, but I worry about this - if you need to register, chances are you'll need to pay. Even if it's just a little, I'm not in favor of giving the government more knobs to turn...I fear that this particular step would only further help the moneyed interests at the expense of the little guy.
Capping liability at the purchase price is a good idea, as it's essentially just removing the ability to gain by producing crap software.
But really, is there any reasonable way to legally define what would qualify as a "bug" in a piece of software? There is already quite a bit of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" going on as things stand now - who's to say that if something like this article proposes came about, companies would not just release their unfixed bugs list as "features" and shield themselves from trouble that way?
I also have trouble envisioning a fair legal line emerging that would determine whether a bug was bad enough to warrant action. Should I be able to sue Microsoft because their software is bloated and slow, or would this only apply to things like security breaches? If my spreadsheet calculation overflows and gives me the wrong answer, is that actionable or should I have known better as a user? So many lines to draw...
Seems too complicated to make something like this fair to me, and I'm somewhat technically literate. Just imagine how useless a law like this would turn out after our friends in Congress got their stink all over it.
I'm with linvir on the not paying the squatters the outrageous fees they're asking; unfortunately, I fear that enough domains are successfully sold for their asking prices to keep these people in business. At ~$10/year for registration, and $1000 asking price, you only need to sell one out of a hundred domains to break even. Push the asking price higher (and from what I've seen, most of them seem to be asking more to the tune of $5k), and you need an even tinier percentage of sales.
Here's a question, although I'm not sure if anyone has the answer: what percentage of registered domain names are parked for domain name speculators as opposed to containing legitimate content? I don't know any good way to check this automatically, as many of the parked pages have BS content on them that is recognizable as such to a human but wouldn't be easy to figure out automatically. But it would be interesting to know, for instance, what percentage of [dictionary word].coms are simply being sat on. From my checking of domains that I would want to use, it seems that somewhere around 95% of the names that are taken (that I would want) have no real content up, just a "Click here to buy this domain name" link and a crapload of ads.
I imagine more people would be accessing sites directly instead of relying solely on the search engines if more of the good names were actually being used. Not that there's any feasible way to bring that about...while it may go against our collective sense of Internet morality, I can't for the life of me think of a reason why domain speculation should be illegal.
Considering MS has pretty much said they intend to kill Google as the dominant search engine, the competition is pretty obvious. Though to be more specific it's really more like MSN vs Google competing for web supremacy.
Ever since I saw question #5 on the Google Labs Aptitude Test, "What's wrong with Unix? How would you fix it?", I've always wondered if Google was working on an OS of their own on the sly. If I was Microsoft, I'd be extremely worried about this prospect, since pretty much every Google offering has randomly appeared on the Google Labs site, for the most part with very little fanfare.
Not to say that it is or is not likely (that's a question I'm in no position to answer), but imagine what it would do to MS if a free Google-flavored Linux distro popped up without warning two weeks before Vista shipped? If there's one company out there that could/would concievably try to make such a thing and get it idiot-proof enough to let the average non-tech person use it effectively (this isn't a bait, but none of the current distributions are there, yet), it's Google. And I think the company has enough goodwill stored up (not to mention the media darling status it has attained) that people would actually pay attention to it and give it a try, even if it was bundled with Google Pack or some other way for Google to monetize. Needless to say, this would all but cement Linux as the operating system of choice for the concievable future, since there would finally be an incentive for everyone to create Linux versions of their programs instead of (or along with) Mac and Windows ones if a reasonable percentage of people were using it.
So if I was Bill Gates, I'd be wetting myself over the Google problem. It's not that Google has indicated any desire to destroy Microsoft, it's that they would stand a fighting chance if they decided to give it a go. No company has ever had that power before, so it's quite rational that MS wants to squash them before the tables turn.
If the school district imposes relevant requirements (such as a physical exam prior to joining a sports team) in order to allow kids to participate that's fair. However, when it comes to unrelated out of school requirements that's the slippery slope. If this policy is acceptable because you consider extracurriculars to be a privilege then at what point do you draw the line?
Let there be no doubt - by no means was I trying to say that I think that either a) this policy is acceptable, or b) that extracurriculars are a privilege. I firmly disagree with both statements. You make an excellent point, that since everyone is charged for these activities, they should be just as protected as education itself.
However, as to the slippery slope, my point was that we are already halfway down it, and that's what concerns me. You mention that it's fair to impose relevant requirements, and the example of sports is quite appropriate. It was a long time ago that it was decided that random drug testing of athletes was perfectly constitutional, on the argument that it was relevant - we don't want kids getting hurt because teammates are high or anything like that. Later on this was pushed further, and random drug testing was imposed in some schools on people doing non-athletic extracurriculars. The argument became "success in extracurriculars requires healthy students, and healthy students don't take drugs." Whether or not you agree that the state has a vested interest in keeping kids off of drugs, it's one thing to drug test unwilling kids to make sure they don't hurt each other; it's quite another to force tests upon non-consenting students engaging in non-athletic activities where they run no risk of physical injury.
Regarding this article, I feel that the situation is even more questionable than the drug-testing one, because it could be at least be argued that a school is obligated do everything in its power to keep kids off of drugs. What this school system is trying to do is literally make speech outside of school punishable, without clearly defining what types of speech it will punish - the paranoid will assume that this is deliberate so that they can decide after the fact. Whether or not this is the case, the restriction is far more onerous than the drug testing (drugs can only be detected for a few weeks - how long do you imagine the average MySpace blog is available? Ever tried to get every search engine out there to un-cache a site?), and if this stands, I fear what will come next for our students.
My advice to anyone faced with a school-imposed requirement like this? Evaluate whether retaining the right to say/do what you like outside of school hours is vitally important to you. If you're reading Slashdot, chances are you're smart enough to not ever say anything online that will get you in trouble, so keep in mind that you can probably just sign the agreement and forget about it forever. If the idea of it still really bothers you, though, go ahead and tell the school system that you won't play their dirty game. Accept that you will not be able to participate in extracurricular activities, but demand that the school include in your permanent record (and send off to colleges when you apply) a letter explaining that the school system itself specifically barred you from participating - this is important, and I don't believe it is an unreasonable request. Find a sympathetic teacher (I guarantee there are a few in your school that are as appalled by this whole thing as you are) that will write a glowing letter in praise of your decision to stand up for your ideals. Get an after school job, volunteer, teach SAT classes, do something with your time to show the colleges that you're not just lazy, and you'll probably come out of it fine.
Or just sign the damn thing. I mean, they've got you by the balls anyway, and in a couple years, you'll be free in the (more or less) true sense of the word. Sucks to be a kid...
While this action quite reasonably offends our sense of liberty and free speech, it is certainly not unprecedented. The fact that students are forced to sign this agreement in order to participate in extracurricular activities is what makes this likely to stand up to scrutiny unless a serious public outcry arises. A choice is given, and as long as students are willing to give up the privilege of participating in extracurriculars (which are not guaranteed/forced on them, unlike education), they are free not to be bound by this agreement.
Schools have been using this gimmick to coerce students into submitting to drug tests for many years now, and as far as I know, it has not been ruled unfair. Not that I support either of these things, as the ultimate effect is to force any student that wants to go to college to either sign the agreement or make up a lot of bogus extracurriculars, but I'm not sure that there's any solid legal argument against it, and there may even be some precedent in its favor.