It has been said that women have it made. They have half the money
I doubt it, since women own less than five percent of the world's land. Possibly because a lot of males in the world treat women the way you're advocating.
That's one of the most intriguing solutions for sorting out copyright law I think I've ever heard.
Ordinary copyright holders automatically keep rights for the valuable life of most works; if they still want to withold it from society for a period after that, they have to pay. Large evil corporations can keep the rest of the world from benefitting from its old works as long as they want, but has to pay back the commons for the privilege.
What's more, if you calibrate the extension fees to be competetive with the cost of lobbying Congress every time the copyright period threatens to move past the creation of Mickey, you might present Disney et al with an economic incentive to support the change...?
I'm not enough of a public policy geek to see how all the details would sort out, but that is one interesting idea. If I had mod points, you'd get 'em.
BSD: Grants all freedoms to users, including the freedom to take away other people's freedoms.
GPL: Grants all freedoms to users, except the freedom to take away other people's freedoms.
The author is right that the confusion between what the two licenses do is a linguistic problem, but it doesn't have anything to do with the meaning of "code" vs the meaning of "project" -- it just has to do with the definition of freedom, which nobody can agree on.
Some people think the BSD version is "more free"; others think the GPL version is "more free". But people usually ignore the contested meaning of the word and assume that their preferred meaning is the only one, which leads to them screaming things like "how can you be against more freedom?!".
Incidentally (and very interestingly), the same debate applies to political ideas of freedom: political libertarians tend to define "freedom" in the BSD sense; political progressives tend to define it in the GPL sense.
Don't think of an elephant!
on
The Privacy Paradox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're absolutely right about this. It's the "don't think of an elephant" argument (which I learned about from a book of the same name by cognitive linguist George Lakoff).
Negative constructions reinforce the positive mental frame that contains them. When Nixon said "I am not a crook", he guaranteed that everyone would think of him as a crook. Saying "we will not violate your privacy" makes people think that you might violate their privacy.
Check out this python app to get MLB media from a text-only interface. The switch to Silverlight broke Linux access completely, so a couple devs got angry and built a great, lightweight app to circumvent MLB's terrible website completely.
In this sense, perhaps Silverlight is a blessing in disguise. Flash was just barely usable enough that people put up with it. Silverlight (for now) is easier to just work around.
Hah! Didn't read the comments in TFA and didn't realize that the post was dated Jan 07, not Jan 08. Oh well. Whatever the Moral Truth of this melodrama, Vota still has some valuable things to say (as well as some not-so-valuable); is providing what, at the moment at least, seems to be one of the best OLPC resources on the web at the moment; and hopefully won't get his honeymoon completely ruined by a bunch of angry nerds slamming him over a year-old conspiracy theory.
That makes this my $0.04, now...
Just in case anybody's wondering why Vota hasn't posted anything to explain this... I think he might be a little busy at the moment, since he's getting married today.
Not that that affects any conflict of interest either way, but he is a private citizen who's been running the blog in his spare time for at least a year. Sucks for him that this hits Slashdot today.
For my part, I've been reading olpcnews for a while and I think it's a serious stretch to call it "highly critical" of OLPC. Vota seems to love OLPC in general and has started a forum for Give-One-Get-One donors (like himself) to post hacks, guides, and help for the machines. He's pretty critical of Negroponte, but it seems that that's mostly because he (reasonably) believes that Negroponte's utopian rhetoric harms the project.
I'm not sure I've seen him weigh in strongly either way on Intel, but he's certainly very against seeing Windows on the OLPC, and has posted articles from other authors that are quite critical of Intel. So IMO: pro-Intel bias, maybe. Anti-OLPC bias, no way.
And how comfortable would you feel having someone else, with whom you are not affiliated in any way, run a MySpace page that presumes to be you?
No, I think you mean somebody running a page about the part of your life that you have made very public, with your name as part of the URL.
I'm a little bemused by this concept of anything with the letters "barackobama" in it as belonging to a person who happens to have that name. If somebody else is named Barack Obama, do they get the page? (How common of a Kenyan name is Barack Obama anyway?) There's gotta be more than one John McCain in the US. If one of them starts a website, can the most famous one just take it away?
Sorry, for a second there I forgot that this is a Murdoch business we're talking about who actually owns the url. Of course they'll take it away. Just a shame that in this case the famous powerful guy who pulls rank over the ordinary American is a candidate who is running on a platform of encouraging a place in the political dialogue for every American no matter how famous or powerful.
As TFA notes, this flap makes everybody look pretty stupid. But no matter how you feel about the Obama campaign or Joe Anthony, why on *earth* did MySpace just pull the URL out from under its owner?
Without that action, this becomes a simple economics problem to sort out between Obama '08 and Anthony: if the campaign wants the product, they pay a price, if they can't agree to a price, they're both on their own. Done and done. Maybe some value is lost, but either way nobody looks like a jerk.
The only thing that makes this story ugly is that Obama '08 requested that MySpace give them Joe Anthony's URL and that, stunningly, MySpace did it. That move leaves Joe Anthony out in the cold, burns 160,000 contacts, makes the campaign look like a bully, and makes it clear to ordinary individuals that spending their time building anything on MySpace is a very bad idea.
MySpace has done something extremely scummy here, and Obama '08 has been stupid enough to use MySpace's scumminess in a way that could bite them badly.
Let's just hope the US press has enough life in it to pick this up and re-empower Joe Anthony in this issue. If that doesn't happen, this is another unfortunate case of an individual's rights being worth less than a corporation's.
As for Obama, he should get personally involved and use his considerable problem-solving abilities to sort this out real quick. Otherwise his campaign's cynical cock-up here is going to do a great job of explicitly contradicting his message of citizen empowerment, blowing his tech-savvy image, and alienating zillions of the young supporters that are now his biggest strength.
Funny how these "small-government" conservatives are the ones who keep busting their tails to shift power out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of the Executive.
Bush seems to still think that he can complete Reagan's vision of a perfect government: one that cracks down hard on individual liberties in the name of security, but still claims to be small and freedom-loving because it allows the biggest and the strongest companies do whatever they want.
I've said thisbefore, but the strength and weakness of Wikipedia is that it's one of the closest things we've got to a representation of What Humanity Has to Say.
Human discourse has its problems, but ultimately, there's a lot of value there. If you can't deal with the untidiness of all human discourse and think that few people will somehow be less wrong than more people, sounds like Citize-pedi-whatever might be for you. If you think that the discourse of our entire species might be useful, head over to Wikipedia.
I must say, this whole fuss reminds me a bit of the idea that democracy won't work because a small number of people must be smarter than a large number of people.
Thank FSM there's still a little bit of Article I hanging on. If it weren't for a free press that's willing to cause a bit of trouble, we'd never have even heard about this.
I don't see a problem with the criteria in our current system -
a.)born here or have gone through the process to become a citizen
b.)old enough to vote
c.)not currently serving a prison sentence or mentally unable to make decisions for yourself
Okay, but those *aren't* the criteria for American citizenship. The criterion is just a.).
Your point about rights and responsibilities is fair enough, but how do we place it in the context of our understanding of basic American freedoms?
IANAL, but my understanding is that the US Constitution, plenty of other US law, and perhaps most importantly, Americans' understanding of their nation and their identity rely upon and guarantee a lot of basic rights that are granted to every citizen. It may be Good and Proper for us to tack "except for some citizens including those who don't bear as much responsibility as others" onto the end of the Bill of Rights, but then we need to deal with that exception and its consequences. For example, elected officials seem to bear disproportionate amounts of responsibility; so do CEOs. Should they get more basic rights of citizenship than a plumber or a factory worker?
I agree that basic rights for *all* citizens can lead to some difficult situations. Most ideas about liberty do. But I'm struggling to see how we can avoid those difficulties other than to:
severely and explicitly limit the rights of many citizens and forget any sort of rhetoric about equality or Freedom for All in America, or
keep the rhetoric and pretend that everybody has the same rights, but just ignore the rights of some citizens.
I hold out some hope that somebody can come up with a third way, but so far courts and lawmakers seem to be going all out for option #2.
Honestly, I'm starting to wonder what value the record companies add to the process of making and selling music if physical delivery stops being important. It seems to me that at the moment they serve two roles:
Banks (artists don't get paid until they've covered costs, so the label is basically just giving them a loan)
Distributors
Distribution now involves an artist sticking a few FLAC or mp3 files on their websites at the cost of a phone bill. To cover recording and marketing costs, artists can get business loans from real banks, probably on better terms than they get from a major label. Assuming equal loan terms, artists end up with exactly the same costs, exactly the same risks, and more control than they had with the labels.
Am I getting something wrong here? Where do these guys add value? Ten years from now, who will pay them money?
The US Constitution was written is a different time. Because of this, it isn't quite as infected with the rampant legalism most current US laws are - to be more specific, the need to specify each & every point, down to the letter. It can be fairly safely assumed that anytime "the people" is used in the Consitution, what they actually meant was "full citizens of the United States."
Okay, got it -- some citizens are full citizens and some aren't. How do we decide which is which again? And then how do we square that decision with this thing they added later?
I'm sorry to be snarky, but I've always had trouble getting past the "some people are more equal than others" logic with these thinkofthechildren issues...
First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that part of the First Amendment that says that the protections it guarantees are limited to people above a certain age. Can somebody remind me exactly which age group of people it is to whom the Bill of Rights doesn't apply?
Goodbye mod points, but I feel too strongly about this to keep my trap shut...
Agreed. Wikipedia seems to be charging in an odd direction in response to criticism, namely, to say "okay, so we need more control over who posts here". What they should be saying is "it doesn't matter who posts here, it only matters what they post".
What makes Wikipedia so valuable is that anything posted is (well, should be) examined on the basis of its own merit, not the credentials of the person posting it. If we wanted to listen to experts just because they're experts, we'd go somewhere else. Wikipedia is one of the few places where content successfully trumps credentials. (Note that experts are usually wrong anyway, as this (Google cached) New Yorker article points out: LINK)
The solution should be to make the integrity of individuals less important and the integrity of content more important, not the other way around. That's Wikipedia's USP and its key to value, and if people had viewed this clown's edits critically in the first place regardless of who he said he was, then the only news here would be that there's one more jerk in Kentucky than we previously realized.
When this (old) news first came out, I posted this gloom and doom comment, but after reading the spec, I realized that the picture was more complicated than my comment, or the summary above, indicates.
The anti-theft system cannot be bypassed as long as P_SF_CORE is enabled (and disabling it requires a developer key). This, in effect, means that a child is free to do any modification to her machine's userspace (by disabling P_SF_RUN without a developer key), but cannot change the running kernel without requesting the key. The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time.
My earlier concerns were that this funcitonality was the same type of call-home spying and TPM kill-switch control that MSFT in its most evil moments would love to have over all of its users and that OLPC had totally screwed the pooch.
The spec makes it seem a bit more like a maximally secure default setting, whose override is difficult but still accessible. They are simply storing the lock (the laptop) and the key (the developer key) in different places. The keys won't be given out if the lock has been reported stolen, but if not, they are available to the machine's owner.
Something about this still worries me, though. The developer key makes this system radically different from something like the WGA's phone-home spyware "feature" in that it can be disabled by the machine's owner, but given that the default setting is so hard to override, is the effect really all that different? Is this going to screw over less techical users who make a mistake and somehow manage not to "renew their lease" frequently enough? Worst of all, if something goes wrong with the centrally-managed key distribution system, millions of kids will be left with fully locked down, unhackable, TPM machines that will brick in an instant if they wait too long to phone home to the server of a government that may be more interested in censoring them than empowering them.
I'd be curious to hear what Stallman has to say about this project, especially this aspect of the security system. I think everything else about this project would suit even his lofty standards to a tee, but I think OLPC is walking a fine line with this anti-theft system.
Slashdot Mirror
Then he would no doubt be proud that simply mentioning his name now makes so clear the moral violations to which he wanted to draw attention.
It has been said that women have it made. They have half the money
I doubt it, since women own less than five percent of the world's land. Possibly because a lot of males in the world treat women the way you're advocating.
That's one of the most intriguing solutions for sorting out copyright law I think I've ever heard.
Ordinary copyright holders automatically keep rights for the valuable life of most works; if they still want to withold it from society for a period after that, they have to pay. Large evil corporations can keep the rest of the world from benefitting from its old works as long as they want, but has to pay back the commons for the privilege.
What's more, if you calibrate the extension fees to be competetive with the cost of lobbying Congress every time the copyright period threatens to move past the creation of Mickey, you might present Disney et al with an economic incentive to support the change...?
I'm not enough of a public policy geek to see how all the details would sort out, but that is one interesting idea. If I had mod points, you'd get 'em.
The author is right that the confusion between what the two licenses do is a linguistic problem, but it doesn't have anything to do with the meaning of "code" vs the meaning of "project" -- it just has to do with the definition of freedom, which nobody can agree on.
Some people think the BSD version is "more free"; others think the GPL version is "more free". But people usually ignore the contested meaning of the word and assume that their preferred meaning is the only one, which leads to them screaming things like "how can you be against more freedom?!".
Incidentally (and very interestingly), the same debate applies to political ideas of freedom: political libertarians tend to define "freedom" in the BSD sense; political progressives tend to define it in the GPL sense.
You're absolutely right about this. It's the "don't think of an elephant" argument (which I learned about from a book of the same name by cognitive linguist George Lakoff).
Negative constructions reinforce the positive mental frame that contains them. When Nixon said "I am not a crook", he guaranteed that everyone would think of him as a crook. Saying "we will not violate your privacy" makes people think that you might violate their privacy.
Check out this python app to get MLB media from a text-only interface. The switch to Silverlight broke Linux access completely, so a couple devs got angry and built a great, lightweight app to circumvent MLB's terrible website completely.
In this sense, perhaps Silverlight is a blessing in disguise. Flash was just barely usable enough that people put up with it. Silverlight (for now) is easier to just work around.
Hah! Didn't read the comments in TFA and didn't realize that the post was dated Jan 07, not Jan 08. Oh well. Whatever the Moral Truth of this melodrama, Vota still has some valuable things to say (as well as some not-so-valuable); is providing what, at the moment at least, seems to be one of the best OLPC resources on the web at the moment; and hopefully won't get his honeymoon completely ruined by a bunch of angry nerds slamming him over a year-old conspiracy theory.
That makes this my $0.04, now...
Just in case anybody's wondering why Vota hasn't posted anything to explain this... I think he might be a little busy at the moment, since he's getting married today.
Not that that affects any conflict of interest either way, but he is a private citizen who's been running the blog in his spare time for at least a year. Sucks for him that this hits Slashdot today.
For my part, I've been reading olpcnews for a while and I think it's a serious stretch to call it "highly critical" of OLPC. Vota seems to love OLPC in general and has started a forum for Give-One-Get-One donors (like himself) to post hacks, guides, and help for the machines. He's pretty critical of Negroponte, but it seems that that's mostly because he (reasonably) believes that Negroponte's utopian rhetoric harms the project.
I'm not sure I've seen him weigh in strongly either way on Intel, but he's certainly very against seeing Windows on the OLPC, and has posted articles from other authors that are quite critical of Intel. So IMO: pro-Intel bias, maybe. Anti-OLPC bias, no way.
No, I think you mean somebody running a page about the part of your life that you have made very public, with your name as part of the URL.
I'm a little bemused by this concept of anything with the letters "barackobama" in it as belonging to a person who happens to have that name. If somebody else is named Barack Obama, do they get the page? (How common of a Kenyan name is Barack Obama anyway?) There's gotta be more than one John McCain in the US. If one of them starts a website, can the most famous one just take it away?
Sorry, for a second there I forgot that this is a Murdoch business we're talking about who actually owns the url. Of course they'll take it away. Just a shame that in this case the famous powerful guy who pulls rank over the ordinary American is a candidate who is running on a platform of encouraging a place in the political dialogue for every American no matter how famous or powerful.
As TFA notes, this flap makes everybody look pretty stupid. But no matter how you feel about the Obama campaign or Joe Anthony, why on *earth* did MySpace just pull the URL out from under its owner?
Without that action, this becomes a simple economics problem to sort out between Obama '08 and Anthony: if the campaign wants the product, they pay a price, if they can't agree to a price, they're both on their own. Done and done. Maybe some value is lost, but either way nobody looks like a jerk.
The only thing that makes this story ugly is that Obama '08 requested that MySpace give them Joe Anthony's URL and that, stunningly, MySpace did it. That move leaves Joe Anthony out in the cold, burns 160,000 contacts, makes the campaign look like a bully, and makes it clear to ordinary individuals that spending their time building anything on MySpace is a very bad idea.
MySpace has done something extremely scummy here, and Obama '08 has been stupid enough to use MySpace's scumminess in a way that could bite them badly.
Let's just hope the US press has enough life in it to pick this up and re-empower Joe Anthony in this issue. If that doesn't happen, this is another unfortunate case of an individual's rights being worth less than a corporation's.
As for Obama, he should get personally involved and use his considerable problem-solving abilities to sort this out real quick. Otherwise his campaign's cynical cock-up here is going to do a great job of explicitly contradicting his message of citizen empowerment, blowing his tech-savvy image, and alienating zillions of the young supporters that are now his biggest strength.
n/t
n/t
Funny how these "small-government" conservatives are the ones who keep busting their tails to shift power out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of the Executive.
Bush seems to still think that he can complete Reagan's vision of a perfect government: one that cracks down hard on individual liberties in the name of security, but still claims to be small and freedom-loving because it allows the biggest and the strongest companies do whatever they want.
Maybe you were thinking of how the decoy effect means you were actually helping Gore.
Or maybe you were just doing something crazy and voting for values you actually believed in.
Edit > Preferences > Cookies > Keep until: I close Firefox
This AC is right on the money. The only thing way I can add to his comment is by tagging the story treacherouscomputing.
I've said this before, but the strength and weakness of Wikipedia is that it's one of the closest things we've got to a representation of What Humanity Has to Say.
Human discourse has its problems, but ultimately, there's a lot of value there. If you can't deal with the untidiness of all human discourse and think that few people will somehow be less wrong than more people, sounds like Citize-pedi-whatever might be for you. If you think that the discourse of our entire species might be useful, head over to Wikipedia.
I must say, this whole fuss reminds me a bit of the idea that democracy won't work because a small number of people must be smarter than a large number of people.
Thank FSM there's still a little bit of Article I hanging on. If it weren't for a free press that's willing to cause a bit of trouble, we'd never have even heard about this.
I don't see a problem with the criteria in our current system -
a.)born here or have gone through the process to become a citizen
b.)old enough to vote
c.)not currently serving a prison sentence or mentally unable to make decisions for yourself
Okay, but those *aren't* the criteria for American citizenship. The criterion is just a.).
Your point about rights and responsibilities is fair enough, but how do we place it in the context of our understanding of basic American freedoms?
IANAL, but my understanding is that the US Constitution, plenty of other US law, and perhaps most importantly, Americans' understanding of their nation and their identity rely upon and guarantee a lot of basic rights that are granted to every citizen. It may be Good and Proper for us to tack "except for some citizens including those who don't bear as much responsibility as others" onto the end of the Bill of Rights, but then we need to deal with that exception and its consequences. For example, elected officials seem to bear disproportionate amounts of responsibility; so do CEOs. Should they get more basic rights of citizenship than a plumber or a factory worker?
I agree that basic rights for *all* citizens can lead to some difficult situations. Most ideas about liberty do. But I'm struggling to see how we can avoid those difficulties other than to:
I hold out some hope that somebody can come up with a third way, but so far courts and lawmakers seem to be going all out for option #2.
Honestly, I'm starting to wonder what value the record companies add to the process of making and selling music if physical delivery stops being important. It seems to me that at the moment they serve two roles:
Distribution now involves an artist sticking a few FLAC or mp3 files on their websites at the cost of a phone bill. To cover recording and marketing costs, artists can get business loans from real banks, probably on better terms than they get from a major label. Assuming equal loan terms, artists end up with exactly the same costs, exactly the same risks, and more control than they had with the labels.
Am I getting something wrong here? Where do these guys add value? Ten years from now, who will pay them money?
Okay, got it -- some citizens are full citizens and some aren't. How do we decide which is which again? And then how do we square that decision with this thing they added later?
I'm sorry to be snarky, but I've always had trouble getting past the "some people are more equal than others" logic with these thinkofthechildren issues...
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that part of the First Amendment that says that the protections it guarantees are limited to people above a certain age. Can somebody remind me exactly which age group of people it is to whom the Bill of Rights doesn't apply?
Goodbye mod points, but I feel too strongly about this to keep my trap shut...
Agreed. Wikipedia seems to be charging in an odd direction in response to criticism, namely, to say "okay, so we need more control over who posts here". What they should be saying is "it doesn't matter who posts here, it only matters what they post".
What makes Wikipedia so valuable is that anything posted is (well, should be) examined on the basis of its own merit, not the credentials of the person posting it. If we wanted to listen to experts just because they're experts, we'd go somewhere else. Wikipedia is one of the few places where content successfully trumps credentials. (Note that experts are usually wrong anyway, as this (Google cached) New Yorker article points out: LINK)
The solution should be to make the integrity of individuals less important and the integrity of content more important, not the other way around. That's Wikipedia's USP and its key to value, and if people had viewed this clown's edits critically in the first place regardless of who he said he was, then the only news here would be that there's one more jerk in Kentucky than we previously realized.
f2 (born in Kentucky)
...Check out the dupe!
When this (old) news first came out, I posted this gloom and doom comment, but after reading the spec, I realized that the picture was more complicated than my comment, or the summary above, indicates.
FTF Spec:
The anti-theft system cannot be bypassed as long as P_SF_CORE is enabled (and disabling it requires a developer key). This, in effect, means that a child is free to do any modification to her machine's userspace (by disabling P_SF_RUN without a developer key), but cannot change the running kernel without requesting the key. The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time.My earlier concerns were that this funcitonality was the same type of call-home spying and TPM kill-switch control that MSFT in its most evil moments would love to have over all of its users and that OLPC had totally screwed the pooch.
The spec makes it seem a bit more like a maximally secure default setting, whose override is difficult but still accessible. They are simply storing the lock (the laptop) and the key (the developer key) in different places. The keys won't be given out if the lock has been reported stolen, but if not, they are available to the machine's owner.
Something about this still worries me, though. The developer key makes this system radically different from something like the WGA's phone-home spyware "feature" in that it can be disabled by the machine's owner, but given that the default setting is so hard to override, is the effect really all that different? Is this going to screw over less techical users who make a mistake and somehow manage not to "renew their lease" frequently enough? Worst of all, if something goes wrong with the centrally-managed key distribution system, millions of kids will be left with fully locked down, unhackable, TPM machines that will brick in an instant if they wait too long to phone home to the server of a government that may be more interested in censoring them than empowering them.
I'd be curious to hear what Stallman has to say about this project, especially this aspect of the security system. I think everything else about this project would suit even his lofty standards to a tee, but I think OLPC is walking a fine line with this anti-theft system.