We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
South Korean scientists have cloned the first dog, succeeding at a project where laboratories and firms in the United States had been beavering away for years. This is a salutary lesson for Europe, more than for the United States, that research in biotechnology and stem cells is increasingly taking place in the ‘Wild East’.
An Afghan puppy, called Snuppy, is now alive after this process:
The process of dog cloning remains highly inefficient, a reflection of how much scientists still have to learn about how to make mammalian offspring from single parents and without the help of sperm. Multiple surgeries on more than 100 anesthetized dogs and the painstaking creation of more than 1,000 laboratory-grown embryos led to the birth of just two cloned puppies — one of which died after three weeks.
Animal rights activists were unimpressed.
Snuppy’s birth announcement, published in today’s issue of Nature, was greeted with scorn by some animal care activists, who decried the work as inhumane and wasteful, given the global glut of unwanted dogs.
“The cruelty and the body count outweighs any benefit that can be gained from this,” said Mary Beth Sweetland, a vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk.
Cloned pets remain unviable for some time yet.
In the debate on software patents, the defenders of patents use moral and theoretical arguments, but avoid using data or facts. Different people are good at making different types of arguments. I am a believer in the division of labour. So not everyone will use empirically-rooted arguments. But it seems a bit odd to me that I cannot find anyone who writes things like:
Because Microsoft did not have a patent on the graphical user interface, it made a decision not to invest in operating systems, but because it had a patent on X it increased R&D in that area by 582%.
Instead, the supporters of software patents concentrate on theoretical arguments. As an example, take this article by a patent lawyer writing about software:
In a market where inventions cannot be protected in order to yield a return on the invested resources, very few would be prepared to make those investments available.
I like theoretical arguments, and the argument in the paragraph above is a perfectly reasonable position to have. But if patents really do have a beneficial effect in software, shouldn’t someone somewhere be able to give us some figures to back up that idea? Where is the empirical evidence?
About a year and a half ago, Terence Kealey gave a talk at a Hobart Lunch at the Institute of Economic Affairs arguing that a world without patents would be more innovative. Dr Kealey is a biochemist who is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham and the author of The Scientific Laws of Economic Research.
It was one of the most interesting events I have been to at the IEA, and the audience was very much split which made for an entertaining Q&A session. I disagreed with Dr Kealey at the lunch, but I recognized there was something to what he said. The lunch was something of a life-changing experience because I have subsequently moved towards his position, though I’m not there yet.
One of the most difficult aspects of thinking about a world with less or no patent protection is that it is so hard to imagine. When thinking about a Britain with a denationalized National Health Service, you can visit mainland Europe or America and see how systems work in other developed countries. Country comparisons aren’t so easily available when it comes to patents.
But one market – that of software – clearly shows that fast innovation can occur without patents, at least in the area of software. If software patents had existed in the US from day one, and if there had been a culture of patenting everything, we might live in a very different world today. We might sit in front of our computers today and see this:
And people would pronounce in public: “Thank goodness that we have software patents. Just as property rights in physical property enables economic development, software patents enable software development.” And they would post articles to that effect on the internet, known in this alternative reality as The Microsoft Network, which might look like this:
And everyone would be thankful that we have a system that clearly and undeniably promotes innovation.
The UN rears its ugly head again as an international political spat is brewing over whether the United Nations will seize control of the heart of the Internet. By ugly I mean those members of the UN whose rule at home has nothing to recommend them such as Syria, China or Ghana. They claim that the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.
One of the things at issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming.
But this is the bit that opens the knife in my pocket.
Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, “consumer protection,” and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for “universal access.”
I know that there is not much love lost for ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, established to handle some of those topics, but these kind of noises from the UN represent a political challenge as they come from predictable corners. CNET news.com provides excerpts from a transcript of a recent closed-door meeting in Geneva convened by the UN’s Working Group on Internet Governance that offers clues about the plot to dethrone ICANN. Please note the sophistication and understanding of internet and the related issues by the participants:
Syria: “There’s more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit…The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable.”
Brazil, responding to ICANN’s approval of .xxx domains: “For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let’s be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names.”
China: “We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework…For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace–we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body.”
Ghana: “There was unanimity for the need for an additional body…This body would therefore address all issues relating to the Internet within the confines of the available expertise which would be anchored at the U.N.”
So the usual ‘control-and-destroy’ approach of the UN scum. Can they do anything about it? Apparently there is the nuclear option .
Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN–but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
Declan McCullagh, the author of the article, believes that such an outcome remains remote, but possible, which turns an obscure debate about Internet governance has suddenly become surprisingly important. I hope the US does not let go…
Story here about how mobile phones were felled by the terror blasts, with a huge upsurge in traffic. Not a great day for the mobile system.
I am glad they caught this guy.
Sven Jaschan is charged with computer sabotage, disrupting public services and illegally altering data.
The 19-year-old is being tried as a minor behind closed doors as he was 17 when he wrote the worm.
Sasser wrought havoc in many companies when the Windows worm struck in May 2004, swamping net links and making computers unusable.
How much high explosive would you have to let off to do as much damage as this little monster unleashed? And before you say that explosives kill people and all he did was screw around with a zillion computers, my guess is that actually, one way or anther, he did kill quite a few people. That much stress and grief must have ended a few lives.
I find myself thinking along these lines. And failing that, onwards and outwards to all those planets out there, so people like this can be transported to them, like in Alien 3.
Yup, they have jilted Motorola…just as the rest of world moves to AMD chips. Heh.
An attempt by two men from northern Minnesota to cross the Arctic Ocean to call attention to global warming ended this morning because of poor weather conditions.
Lonnie Dupre, 43, and Eric Larsen, 33, were forced to abandon their planned 100-day, 1,200-mile trek after encountering unexpectedly heavy snow storms, strong winds and unusual ice conditions, according to Jane Kochersperger, a media officer with the environmental group Greenpeace, which co-sponsored the trip.
Some things just speak for themselves.
As strange as it may sound, I still maintain a smidgeon of sympathy with all those wretched, deluded souls who sincerely believed that technology was going to liberate us all from the leviathan. I am but fearful. They, on the other hand, must be both fearful and crushed:
The British government acknowledged Monday that it would consider using implanted ID chips to track sex offenders, raising the specter of forced chipping.
While not yet a reality, implants that can remotely check bodily functions and location are just around the corner: Microchips are being developed for a variety of health functions, and a Florida company is planning to develop a prototype of an implanted GPS device by the end of the year.
When the Food and Drug Administration green-lighted the use of ID chips in humans last month, civil liberties advocates worried that people could be forced to get chipped as a condition of employment or parole. News that the British government may implant sex offenders in the future fanned those fears.
Of course, it will start with convicted (or maybe even suspected) child molesters. Who could possibly object to that?
The latest posting of my Internet acquaintance Adam Tinworth (we first linked because he is professionally interested in new architecture and I am an amateur fan of it) consists of just two paragraphs, and yet is full of insight into the way we live now. Either paragraph would have served well as a Samizdata quote of the day.
I could not decide which to pick, and in any case did not want to neglect the other, so here are both:
WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.
In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I’m meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I’d better be on my best behaviour, hadn’t I?
There is indeed, I think, something very Jane Austenish about blogging. Simply from the point of view of good manners it seems to bring the best out of a lot of people, and to moderate their snarkier tendencies, in just the kind of way that Tinworth has registered.
It is understandable that the Mainstream Media have focussed, when discussing blogging, on the impact of blogging on the Mainstream Media. Is blogging another way, and a better way, and a more cost effective way, and a less politically choosy way, to do what they already pride themselves on doing, namely to rake muck and to make powerful people wish that the ground would open up and swallow them?
This is a very good question, but it misses the degree to which blogging may also serve to make regular people just plain nicer and more polite to one another.
The steady advances in cloning technology holds a great deal of hope the future of the species and the news from Korea and Britain has been pretty damn encouraging over the last few years. It now looks like we could be on the brink of being able to mass produce stem cells and that, boys and girls, could be the gateway to a new era of medical possibilities.
Xavier Méra has a piece up at Institut économique Molinari about the continuing and seemingly never-ending EU vendetta against Microsoft.
Concluding paragraphs:
That is not all. EU spokesman Antonia Mochan observed that the Media Player affair went “beyond the question of its name,” which has now been settled. Indeed, Microsoft’s rivals complain that the reduced version of Windows is not totally compatible with their programs. The EU’s competition department has stated that tests are under way, and an EU source wishing to remain anonymous confirmed the plaintiffs’ complaints about compatibility. It is perhaps this aspect, the least widely reported in the Media Player affair, which reveals the most about the validity of the charges made against the IT giant. In fact, if the commission ends up denouncing this state of affairs, it will once again be contradicting grievances it has put forward about Microsoft.
The point of the penalty is that the integrated version of Media Player allegedly damages competitors. Withdrawing it should therefore benefit them. If this is not the case, as they say and as the commission spokesperson suggests, that means these rival software writers are in reality third-party beneficiaries of the Windows Media Player system. It cannot be argued in the same breath that Microsoft both hurts and helps its competitors with the same product. It follows then that we cannot criticize Microsoft both for putting forward a Windows “N” that is “flawed” because it doesn’t contain specific Media Player files, and for being an “unfair” competitor with its complete version.
In a trial where logic has not been taken seriously, arbitrary judgement has played a more significant role than reason and experience. As the accusation continues down the same path, the Microsoft case is coming to look more and more like a witch-hunt.
Well, it sounds to me more like that Microsoft, having been ordered to do business differently from the utterly reasonable and beneficial-to-all-except-rivals way that it wants to, may have introduced a little minor self-inflicted sabotage, Atlas Shrugged style, in order to make the EU regulators feel like the prats that they are.
Either that, or they are maybe indulging in that alternative version of sabotage that consists of doing everything you are told and nothing else, which always causes havoc. Few things ruin complicated technological systems more quickly and more completely than pure obedience. Okay, if that is what you bastards say you want, that is what you will get . . .
And I say that they have a perfect right to do all of that. I have always thought that bitching about Microsoft including Media Player in Windows is about as sane as complaining about a car company including hub caps on its cars, on the grounds that this discriminates against disappointed hub cap suppliers. Which it sort of does, but so bloody what?
By the way, the first version of this posting that I stuck up was entitled, in error: “The EU versus the EU (again)”. (I decided to change it from “Microsoft versus the EU” to “The EU versus Microsoft”, but only got half way.) But maybe this was not such an error. Self destruction is what the EU often seems to be all about.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
