Archive for the ‘predictive frameworks’ Category
Other titles that I considered for this post were: The RIAA loses, but doesn’t realize it or Boycotting the RIAA has never made more sense, or been easier… because this post touches on all these issues. But in the end, I decided on a snippet from the excellent blog Recording Industry vs The People.
The RIAA ‘wins’ the first case that has gone to trial for illegal peer to peer file sharing. They seem to think that they’ve won a major victory. My grandmother had a saying that went ‘don’t cut off your nose to spite your face…’ As reported on ABC news:
Woman Ordered to Pay $222,000 in File-Sharing Case
Experts Say Verdict is Clear Win for RIAA, Record Labels
By ASHLEY PHILLIPS
Oct. 4, 2007In the first lawsuit over file sharing to make it to court, a jury ordered a woman who record labels claimed illegally shared songs to pay the labels $222,000.
The lawsuit, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, the record label lobbying organization, accused Jammie Thomas of sharing more than 1,700 songs on the now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa. The suit contended that Thomas violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by distributing songs for free that belonged to the record labels.
“We welcome the jury’s decision,” the RIAA said in an e-mailed statement following the decision. “The law here is clear, as are the consequences for breaking it. As with all our cases, we seek to resolve them quickly in a fair and reasonable manner.
Hey RIAA, get a clue! Do you really think Joe Sixpack believes that a $222,000 fine is “fair and reasonable”?
By the way, you have just:
1. Sued your own customer,
2. Made yourself look like a bully,
3. Made the DMCA enormously less popular,
4. Strengthened the case for copyright reform
So just like Dirty Harry said: Go ahead, make my day. The RIAA has engaged in plenty of obfuscation and smoke and mirrors of their own. That is about to end, thanks to the RIAA’s attitude towards their own customers. Thankfully, there are a great many places where you can get great music without supporting the RIAA.
Just who is the RIAA anyway? They really don’t want you to know, as they are engaging in a highly unpopular and undemocratic activity, so they obfuscate. Look at their website for the answer? Do you think you will find that information on their website? surprise surprise–you will not! But have no fear-wikipedia has unearthed the truth (again!)
The case of the man who sued his drycleaners for 67 million dollars has nothing on the RIAA, who is suing the Russian web site allofmp3.com for 1.65 trillon dollars. This exceeds the entire GDP of Russia. If they succeeded in this lawsuit and were somehow able to collect, the income from this lawsuit alone would be greater the the income of the recording industry from all other sources since the recording industry came into existence.
As reported by wikipedia:
On December 18, 2006,[11] the RIAA, on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group filed a US$1.65 trillion lawsuit against the site. That equates to US$150,000 for each of 11 million songs downloaded between June to October 2006, and exceeds Russia’s entire GDP.[12][13] $150,000 is the statutory limit for copyright infringement awards in the United States.[14] Allofmp3 responded to the lawsuit saying “AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York. This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”.[15]
Microsoft probably thinks themselves very clever, having figured out a way to get revenue from GNU/Linux®. Their thinly veiled threats to sue, and to extract a fee for the right to use GNU/Linux®, seems to have borne fruit in that Dell is now buying SLES (SuSE Linux® Enterprise Server) licenses from Microsoft. However there are at least three silver linings to this development.
“But how many functional enemies willing to disperse such agents and have the (alarming) patience to wait for for years before mortality begins?”
And this questions fits right in with the subject of a draft post I had been writing, and it is is also a question others have been asking as well. The question is phrased slightly differently, but in essence it is the same question. (Incidentally, Mark has buried the most important word in his question in parenthesis.) Here is a report summarized over at Bugs ‘N’ Gas Gal’s site:
The evidence of al-Qaeda’s interest in conducting a terrorist attack with chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons appears compelling. As early as 1998, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden declared the acquisition of CBRN weapons a “religious duty” for Muslims [1]. He followed up in 2003 by asking for and receiving a fatwa from Saudi Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd that condoned the use of CBRN weapons by Muslims against infidels [2]. Combined with the multitude of warnings from al-Qaeda associates that a CBRN attack against the West is not only forthcoming but also long overdue, the Muslim “duty to warn” has been firmly established. In al-Qaeda’s opinion, no further justification is needed and no additional warnings are required [3].
…
Given this stated desire and apparent capability to conduct a CBRN terrorist attack, why has al-Qaeda not yet launched an attack with such weapons? This analysis explores three possible explanations for this lack of a CBRN attack: disruption, deterrence and, most disturbingly, patience.
Looking through the overstock of my Grandfather’s bookstore, I have quite a number of Architectural Magazines, including many editions of “The American Architect,” “The Architectural Forum” (which actually covered Architecture, unlike today’s Architectural Forum, which almost no Architects read) and “The International Studio.” They cover the period from from the early teens to the late Thirties, but most fall between 1928 and 1934.
From the December 1930 edition of “The American Architect” there is an interesting article about Seadromes. Of course, no one today knows what a Seadrome is because they were never built, so this article is just about the only source I am aware of. There isn’t even an entry on Wikipedia. (Although there is a paragraph about them in the entry for Edward Robert Armstrong, the Engineer who had conceptualized and advocated the Seadrome concept.)
An interesting excerpt from Collapse by Jared Diamond, about the native intelligence of New Guinea highland farmers, the utility and longevity of that knowledge:
New Guinea is the large island just North of Australia…lying almost on the equator and hence with hot tropical rainforest in the lowlands, but whose rugged interior consists of alternating ridges and valleys culminating in glacier-covered mountains….The terrain ruggedness confined Europeans to the coast and lowland rivers for almost 400 years, during which it became assumed that the interior was forest covered and uninhabited…It was therefore a shock, when airplanes chartered by biologists and miners first flew over the interior in the 1930’s for the pilots to see below them a landscape transformed by millions of people previously unknown to the outside world…..we know now…that agriculture has been going on there for about 7,000 years–one of the world’s longest-running experiments in sustainable agriculture.
…their farming methods are sophisticated, so much so that European agronomists still don’t understand today in some cases the reasons why New Guineans’ methods work and why well-intentioned European farming innovations failed there. For instance, one European agricultural adviser was horrified to notice that a New Guinean sweet potato garden on a steep slope in a wet area had vertical drainage ditches running straight down the slope. He convinced the villagers to correct their awful mistake, and instead to put in drains running horizontally along contours, according to good European practices. Awed by him the villagers re-oriented their drains, with the result that the water built up behind the drains, and in the next heavy rains a landslide carried the entire garden down the slope to the river below. To avoid exactly that outcome, New Guinea farmers long before the arrival of the Europeans learned the virtues of vertical drains under highland rain and soil conditions. (page 280)
My observation is that the knowledge of the European and the New Guinea highlander were different in one very crucial way: the way that the knowledge was acquired. The knowledge that the New Guinea highlander had was acquired over many generations, iteratively, through trial and error. Such knowledge could be called evolved knowledge, because it evolves, good replacing bad, and no overall theoretical framework is required to advance such knowledge. It also had a unique relation to the site at which the knowledge was acquired.
OR TYPES OF FAILURES OF PREDICTIVE FRAMEWORKS
A project that I have long wanted very much to do is to write a history of the Future, especially, a history of the Future as seen in popular culture. Certainly a society’s view of its future tells what it values, and what it fears. If the positive outweigh the negatives, then we have futures such as is seen in Star Trek. When the negatives outweigh the positives, we have distopias, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, George Orwell’s 1984, the Mad Max movies, Brave New World, or works such as Philip Dick’s Blade Runner or The Lathe of Heaven. In each of these distopian visions though, society fails in different ways.
The failure modes are each different and therefore informative. Sometimes these distopias actually do seem to predict the future, or at least a little piece of it. It is telling that it is very easy to think of many distopian futures, but rather difficult to think of utopian ones. It is clear that we are more interested in our possible failures.
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