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KR

I predict using my current framework:

Karl Rove will end up resigning from his new appointment. He will take his previous job or work as efficiently as now, in some think tank. Fox News mis-quotes the president by claiming he said the responsible party in the Plame case will not work in the White House. President had originally said that the responsible person will be punished.

The media is after Rove.

Ergo, Rove will leave the white house. Which makes me think that the reason for his "promotion" in the first place was to have him come down. If Rove were a civilian, how else would you punish him? More options would be available. Some undesirable. By framing the issue as 'if guilty, no whitehouse', harsher punishments are being avoided. He committed a federal offense.

Ofcourse, the whole Rove spiel could also be a red herring. And ofcourse, it could be a piece of meat thrown at the Democrats to soothe them out.

Microsoft's Personnel Puzzle

"How Would You Move Mount Fuji?"

mv /mnt/fuji /dev/null

LOL!

What the bleep do we know?

Interesting points in the movie:

- God not being judgmental but transcending reality.
- Quantas going back and forth between different realities. Could be a link to life after death.
- The water experiment and how thoughts affect molecular structure. (Is it verified by other scientists?)
- Peptides affecting moods and our reliance on peptides. Also, the body not b eing satisfied by current dosage of peptides, hence humans looking for more.

Game maps

For FPS games, the maps are static. What if the maps are dynamic, constantly changing depending on the game's state?

Sold Out

By James Boyle

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We've got the information age all wrong. Someone who reads today's newspapers would conclude that the four most important aspects of the information age are cyberporn, Windows 95, Newt Gingrich and cyberporn. This is like saying that the most important signposts during the rise of industrial capitalism in America were mass-produced pornographic magazines, Warren Gamaliel Harding and the Veg-O-Matic.
To understand the age we have entered, we need more than a modem, the Bill of Rights and a subscription to Penthouse on line. We need to figure out how the world changes when information becomes one of the most important forms of wealth and power: when everything from the pattern of purchases revealed by credit card receipts to the pattern of your D.N.A. can become a byte of information, to be bought and sold in the marketplace.

The first effect of this transformation is that intellectual property rights become very important. Around the world, corporations are lobbying their governments, demanding more expansive copyright, patent, trademark and data-base rights. Governments are complying, granting monopolies over information and information products that make the monopolies of the 19th-century robber barons look like penny-ante operations.

Intellectual property rights are being expanded dramatically, sometimes in surprising directions. Even human genetic information has been privatized. The gene that indicates a predisposition to breast cancer, for example -- called BRCA1 -- has been patented by Myriad Genetics. Harvard University even has a patent (No. 4,736,866) on a mouse -- the Oncomouse -- a transgenic species engineered to be prone to cancer. But beyond these examples, with their Brave New World overtones, lies a more general trend. We are in the middle of an information land grab and no one seems to have noticed.

There is a reason for this apparent blindness. The information economy is unfamiliar territory. When private parties are allowed to exploit Federal land, we can all work out the politics of the situation. We know the arguments (and the interest groups) for and against. But who wins and who loses when the property at stake is intellectual, and the struggle is over the extension of a copyright term or a software patent? As yet, we have no politics of the information age; we don't see the linkages between issues or perceive a common interest in apparently disparate situations.

Who is affected by the politics of intellectual property? Many groups are, though they might not see it that way. Some of the most innovative software engineers have objected to the extension of patent law to cover their products; they fear it will help create an oligopolistic software market and diminish inventiveness. Gay rights activists, meanwhile, are told there can be no Gay Olympics because the United States Olympic Committee owns the word "Olympic" and won't permit its use. (After all, what could be more foreign to the traditions of ancient Greece than homosexuality?) Environmentalists wish that some of the profits on patented pharmaceuticals drawn from the rain forest could be returned to protect their source. Religious organizations protest the patenting of living organisms.

Each group is complaining about an intellectual property system that has expanded out of control. Yet they don't see those complaints, or their interests, as linked. Part of the problem is that we have not adapted our public debate to the realities of the information age. Censorship we understand. But the subtler forms of control imposed by ownership of information? These. are harder to discuss.

Congress as now considering the Clinton Administration's proposal for intellectual property on the Internet, aimed at "saving" this thriving medium. Using a far-fetched theory of what constitutes "copying," the proposal would turn browsing an Internet document into a copyright violation. It would effectively privatize much of the public domain by transforming the current law of fair use. It would make on-line service providers strictly liable for their customers' copyright violations, thus giving providers an incentive to monitor what you do in cyberspace.

These proposals are extraordinarily far-reaching. They have been criticized by educators, librarians, writers, civil libertarians and entrepreneurs, who fear that the Net will become a pay-as-you-go information toll road. And yet there is scarcely any coverage of these issues in the press. "Intellectual property" is presumed to be too dry, too technical, an issue, one mainly of interest to specialists.

The information land grab isn't confined to the Internet. In fields ranging from software to biography, biotechnology to court reporting, the general tendency of intellectual property rights has been to grasp outward, ever outward. Some might say, Isn't this necessary? Information products are expensive to create, after all, and cheap to copy; that's why we need intellectual property rights, right?

But the issue isn't so simple. Imagine that you were the intellectual property czar, charged only with creating the most efficient, productive system of property rights. You don't care about free speech, artistic integrity or equal access. All you care about is economic efficiency. What would you do?

At first it might seem that you would just hand out copyrights and patents galore, and even expand the scope of such rights to give innovators a higher return on their investment. The greater their incentive, the more drugs, programs, data bases and gene maps they will develop, right? Not necessarily.

Although courts, economists and United States trade representatives often talk this way, the effect of intellectual property restrictions on innovation is not so clear-cut. Entrepreneurs have to be assured that time spent developing new software won't be wasted, that a profit lies at the end of the tunnel. But they also require an adequate amount of raw material; there has to be an adequate flow of information for the market to function.

This is true even in literature. "Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels," as the critic Northrop Frye famously put it. The same goes for computer programs, which build on the contributions of earlier hackers, or for biotechnology projects, which rely on the availability of unpatented cell lines, and so on and so on. Every intellectual property claim is a chunk taken out of the public domain. If classroom copying is sharply curtailed, if we give someone a software patent over basic functions, at some point the public domain will be so diminished that future creators will be prevented from creating because they won't be able to afford the raw materials they need. An intellectual property system has to insure that the fertile public domain is not converted into a fallow landscape of walled private plots. We are in danger of forgetting this.

Right now, the ground rules of the information society are being laid down by lawyers (strike one) employed by the biggest players in the field (strike two), all with little public debate or press scrutiny. This is bad politics in the thrall of worse economics. We need a politics and a press of the information age. Access to dirty pictures will be little consolation, and speech anything but free, if we let this moment escape our grasp.

The Right to Read - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).

(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection Authority--would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he couldn't refuse to help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak with her filled him with delight. And that she chose him to ask for help, that could mean she loved him too.

Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkable--he lent her the computer, and told her his password. This way, if Lissa read his books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was still a crime, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it. They would only find out if Lissa reported him.

Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless of what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn't matter whether you did anything harmful--the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this--not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Later, Dan would learn that this kind of university policy started only in the 1980s, when university students in large numbers began using computers. Previously, universities maintained a different approach to student discipline; they punished activities that were harmful, not those that merely raised suspicion.

Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to their marriage, and also led them to question what they had been taught about piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of copyright, about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and even the original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they found others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to read soon became one of its central aims.

Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman

Tutorials - Pixel2life.com Tutorial Search Engine

Tutorials - Pixel2life.com Tutorial Search Engine

Bertrand Russell on Mass Psychology

..."I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment." "...The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship.... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray." "...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. The populace will in general be too busy earning a living or too lazy or just too world weary to care much about where and how they arrived at their convictions. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."

– Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1951

Serious Creativity - creativity software featuring Dr Edward de Bono