Perhaps you remember the article January about SOPA where we posted this great video:

When I stumbled on this great quote from Hayek’s book, I was inspired to repeat this again, perhaps better articulated. Our copyright and patent laws are an affront to social evolution:

“The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.

Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.“

It would be hard to say it any better than this brilliant economist, but I’d like to reword that last bit based on my experience: The kind of anti-competitive behavior associated with copyrights and patents lead to a WASTE of time and resources creating an imaginary race to be the first to claim rights to the next invention. Individuals and corporations alike buy their lottery ticket by funding teams that work concurrently to other teams at other companies on the exact same concepts. WASTEFUL of resources, and WASTEFUL of life. Perhaps nowhere is this more blatant than in the realm of medicine. This WASTE turns all business into another high stakes gamble. A horse race to be exact. It has the exact opposite effect that was intended. In fact the “horses” will steal any concept that isn’t nailed down in their charge for the claim of originality. In the end there is less originality rather than more.

Time and again we meet another “entrepreneur” wanting to chase a new concept that a dozen other chaps are already chasing. No capitalist in their right minds would do this if it weren’t for the possibility of beating the others out for the patent. Worse yet, then convincing the world of the value of their patent, up to and including bribing the FDA. What a mess.

Being a software engineer may be enough to make me wise to the fact that we cannot engineer society. Most importantly we cannot allow Sony to engineer society. When they do it they fight for the right to record cable shows on their VCRs and then fight against the right to copy their shows to MP3 … they fight for their profit. If we let them, they will. Stop social engineering. One less Transformers movie won’t hurt anyone. In fact, maybe the guy about to discover the cure for cancer will be in the lab instead of watching another DVD.

Firstly, complaints about valid comments not being released. This site receives hundreds of spam comments per day, and thankfully only a few make it through our filters. Of those hundreds, there are dozens that are entered manually and get queued for moderation. We have honestly just been too busy to weed through and had often opted to just wipe them out. If you have been a victim of this, please accept our sincere apologies and realize it is nothing personal.

Secondly, the number of compromise attempts of our site has risen since our private client blog got mentioned in a publication. The content in the REDACTED article is the only content we authorized release of, and the only content that will be released. Feel free to continue to probe our site, you’ll not get far. In fact, your visits to several of our honeypot areas are helping us build yet another product. In other words, give it up 91.217.178.220 et al. We know you’re there, we just don’t really care enough to block you.

-Josh

Leave it to Microsoft to take what should have been an easy task, call it “easy” and then proceed to make their wizard lead you straight to a mess.

The problem is, that while the “Easy Transfer” wizard claims that you are copying “an account” what you’re really just doing is copying files. That may seem obvious, but get this. If you setup up the new machine, and that machine has 2 users, and you log in as user A assuming that this “account transfer” is “smart” as “wizards” always pretend to be… so you initiate a transfer of user B… Guess what!??!! You will, very stupidly be stuck with a bunch of files copied into user A’s profile. No new user.

**EDIT: Turns out I was the stupid one. I failed to read the sentence on the first wizard page carefully. It clearly states that going to the advanced tab is necessary to accomplish precisely what I wanted… After clearing out 19000+ files from the wrong user profile I have learned to slow down and read. Something I’ve had to tell other users so many times. I can whine that it didn’t have the “sense” to warn me when it discovered gigs of files already existing in the destination account, but that would be too much to ask. CLICK ADVANCED… I REPEAT CLICK ADVANCED…. I’m not sure that I’d hide that setting under advanced, but CLICK IT! …

So take heed of my warning here (which, after you realize the ass you made of yourself by assuming that easy really meant “easy” you’ll discover exists all over the web) … create the user that you are copying. Windows is not planning on doing it for you, despite their claim that you are copying a “user account”. They just do a dumb file copy.

In fact, after reading a few other nightmares be sure, they will be copying junk you don’t want. From what I can tell, even junk you unchecked. It may well be better to skip the “easy transfer” and do things the “hard” way. As for me, this is going to be a big old pain in the butt. I have to figure out how to remove all of these files that are now intermingled with my other user’s files. Thankfully I have fairly current backups. Let’s hope system restore does it… (I’m not holding my breath on that one).

Please click the image on the right and submit the petition!

I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to vote “no” on cloture for S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, on Jan. 24th. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. It does not deserve floor consideration. I urge my representative to vote “no” on SOPA, the corresponding House bill.

Over coming days you’ll be hearing from the many businesses, advocacy organizations, and ordinary Americans who oppose this legislation because of the myriad ways in which it will stifle free speech and innovation. We hope you’ll take our concerns to heart and oppose this legislation by voting “no” on cloture.

While we’re at it, what do you think about this?

We often steer folks away from .NET implementations for the simple reason that compiled languages add an unnecessary layer of complexity to the production process & have caused a nightmare for maintainers. I personally love writing C# but can’t recommend it for a web site. Not when interpreted languages are so powerful and often perform better than the .NET VM.

However the title of “sucks” is reserved for a handful of technologies whose developers knew exactly what they were doing. Making products purposely limited to control the user base does suck in the tyrannical, Godwin’s law, way. That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

However, if you are a polyglot you may be a dying breed. Unless you’re careful that work you’re doing now will be the only work you ever learn to do. The more specific your experiences are the less adaptable your solutions will be. Then one day you’ll say, without any embarrassment: “I don’t know how to do that.” … If you are a real technologist that sentence had better be followed by: “ … but I’ll figure out how.” … if it is not, you are probably a monoglot, and you may well find yourself cursed with the ungraceful miasma of obsolete skills. Perhaps your employer will “keep” you because of your obsolete skills, but you’ll be stuck, and it will suck. You’ll rot in your office chair anxious for the day you can retire.

Polyglots like us have the gigantic benefit of never becoming obsolete, we are edge cutters, we aren’t afraid of new stuff, we assimilate new technologies like Cheerios. Polyglots are cool, and we may make a hobby of antagonizing the Monoglots (or “fanboys”) but our license is our knowledge. We can rip on the things we know, it’s what the “fanboys” don’t know that make them entertaining.

If you are a monoglot, stop it. Stop it now! Then you’ll get the joke.

Being an avid, albeit amateur, physics aficionado, I watched with great interest as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded. I read the summary findings, which were actually somewhat disappointing. I read the conclusions, and the new theories. In the end I shook my head in disbelief, yet another mythical beast of Greek proportions has been added to our skyline. Among the “black holes” and “dark matter” now there is “dark energy” and I am forced to ask the question: has science died?

If I thought you’d watch a 70 minute lecture I might refer you to this: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_ls_physics, but nowadays folks are much too busy for that. Even our posts here have grown too long to garner the attention we used to see on these topics. We have a headline culture that responds to headline length thoughts.

Given the above, let me give you the simple version. The team that won the Nobel Prize identified that a super-nova remnant is not just moving away, but actually is accelerating away. The reason this is newsworthy is that no accepted model allows for acceleration to occur. Acceleration requires the application of force, and therefore these scientists were obliged to invent a reason for the observed behavior. The reason? “Dark energy”… They won the prize because they kept everyone in business, they were team players.

Realize, despite what you see on “Star Trek” or hear on the most recent episodes of “The Big Bang Theory” black holes and dark matter are only theoretical entities meant to explain unexpected behavior. Hence the term “dark energy” is the logical cause of the unexpected acceleration that has been measured. I’ll leave the question-ability of their results to folks like Wal : http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=8qx7sc1r … What I will do here is point out that these fantasies that pass for science nowadays would make Socrates giggle.

Has science died? Well, I hope not. Practical folks that actually produce working technology are continuing to improve them. That is science too. However, we do need a new breed of theoretical philosophy if we hope to make any major leaps in our understanding of nature around us. If you make stuff that works, please take a minute to think about what the AS or the Nobel Committee has done for us lately. They reward rank & file instead of results. Investigate the alternative theories like Wal’s “EU” and question EVERYTHING!

I hope you’ll take time to watch the Harriman lecture above and really grab the concepts he presents. There is a crisis and it affects us all, limits us all, and could kill us all. It’s no wonder that climate science is so unconvincing.

1. Trend Setter
2. Business Sense
3. Clever

As we discussed these virtues, we worked through the second layer, what about these virtues made us dislike what Steve Jobs stood for, and the answer was simple, we did not like that the list above was not what those sold out to Apple would list, they would list something like:

1. Innovator
2. Visionary
3. Leader

This is the disparity. In fact in the wake of his passing we have seen claims that he invented everything from tablet computers to mp3 players. We have seen friends lament as though a dear friend has just passed away. We have seen hero worship in the highest form, and most of that goes back to the list of characteristics that he managed to convince those fans were true. That is why we (and others like us) cringe at the praise. It was deception, and many were happy to have the wool pulled over their eyes. Macs are trendy, true, but there is very little in the way of innovation to be found. From mice to touch screens to GUIs, none of these are inventions of Apple, they are assimilations.

So let’s recognize him for his incredible talent, but be honest about what his talent was. He was a fashion designer for gadgets. In a world notoriously lacking aesthetic savvy this turtleneck clad “Coco Chanel” convinced his customers to spend more for a label. It’s brilliant, and it is what fashion has been about for more than a century. My mom can tell you that her Windows computer “just works” … but she does not love Windows the way Apple users love their little Apple stickers. Steve Jobs masterfully created a brand that was loved by many, and that is a talent in itself.

We doubt that the PC vs. Mac war will end soon. The people who get things done on computers will usually admit that both tools will do the job. The most savvy can do more with PCs because their PCs have better specs than any Mac. We do not mind if you want a stylish Mac on your desk, they are prettier than any PC we’re aware of. What we mind is when we hear nonsense about security and reliability come up. When someone makes the generalization “it’s better”… The fact is not only are they not better, but they are worse in many ways. “It just works” another farce. Anyone with significant computer experience can list as many (if not more) ways that a Mac does NOT work, than a PC. My computing amateur friend put it quite nicely when he said: “I know I’ll pay more for less, and that you can do more with a PC than with a Mac, but I like these, they’re really nice.” … That’s what I call an informed decision. Steve Jobs was an artist, as any good fashion designer should be, he was a genius, but not in technology, in style. He deserves respect, but for the right reasons.

As for all of the disinformation and OTT hero worship I’ll leave you with this article: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3318250.html

We voiced months ago our opinion that for many a cult of personality has formed. Cohen (in his article above) does a good job describing our feelings on the matter. Now in his passing quotes are popping up like religious proverbs. Some are wrongly attributed, and others are so uncharacteristic of his actual life that they appear to also be incorrect. There is a real possibility that some spiritual icon is forming around this. I highly suggest a look at Cohen’s article and resisting any urge you have to bring about the, as Cohen says: “beatification of the blessed Jobs of Silicon Valley”.

Foldit is much like Mahjong or even Solitaire in that it presents as a puzzle game, albeit in 3D! … However, the rules of the game are as near a match to the rules of biology, chemistry & physics as a computer can muster. The objective of each puzzle is to organize a molecule in the most efficient way possible. Just like any puzzle game, it seems a bit complex at first but once you get a feel for it it really is pretty fun.

So now is the brilliant part. Within these levels of known structures this brilliant game (supported by the Center for Game Science at the the University of Washington) injects unknown structures with the hopes that they could be solved in the same fashion.

Guess what, they did! In about 10 days! The researchers really thought this was a long-shot but the results are astounding.

So perhaps the most interesting point of this brilliant exercise is what the peanut gallery has to say. Perhaps ironically, since gamers solved the puzzle, the peanut gallery becomes the academics who didn’t. Obviously the researchers themselves were elated. The academic world is not entirely devoid of humility. However, there is plenty of vitriol to be found from those who do lack humility.

“The gamer just got lucky, that’s all there is to it.” – Post from message board.

I suspect that the Center for Game Science at UofW will be taking exception to that claim. It reminds me of the many stories about Albert Einstein, not being able to speak until he was 4, not being able to tie his shoes even into his teens… Perhaps they are fables, but perhaps it stands to reason that intelligence just comes in a variety of forms and those fascinated with solving a puzzle are not especially interested in memorizing the solution. A trait that is vastly undervalued on the academic track. It may shake their doctorate, post-graduate, world, but maybe they are not quite as elite as they’ve come to believe.

Whatever the case, I hope we hear a lot more about this. I’ve always believed that the most practical among us are those who are trying to take the next step, and almost always the most practical among us are the ones responsible for us taking the next step. There are those who dream and fantasize about 100 years down the road. Usually borrowing ideas from George Lucas. However, 100 years later we’re shaking our heads thinking how silly those ideas were. They overreach, they become “idea people” with no grasp and little skill in reality. Somehow they often stand in the spotlight, making predictions that are absurd at best, while the doers are doing. A shout out to the doers of the world. Some of us know that the doers ARE the idea people. The doers are the ones whose ideas must match up with reality. Doers have vision, and even fantasies, but they manage to actually produce like these gamers did. This is a tribute to you, doer.

¹ God is our refuge and strength, 
   an ever-present help in trouble. 
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way 
   and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 
³ though its waters roar and foam 
   and the mountains quake with their surging.

 ⁴ There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, 
   the holy place where the Most High dwells. 
⁵ God is within her, she will not fall; 
   God will help her at break of day. 
⁶ Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; 
   he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

 ⁷ The LORD Almighty is with us; 
   the God of Jacob is our fortress.

 ⁸ Come and see what the LORD has done, 
   the desolations he has brought on the earth. 
⁹ He makes wars cease 
   to the ends of the earth. 
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; 
   he burns the shields^[d] with fire. 
¹⁰ He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; 
   I will be exalted among the nations, 
   I will be exalted in the earth.”

Thank you Mr. President for bringing pure hope and comfort today. We will never forget 9/11 and what it means. When our nation is blessed we will be hated by evil people. Just as Israel was blessed by God, so has America been. Just as the evil have hated Israel so have they hated America. Yet we continue to be blessed.

As verse 2 above mentions, those evil people have tried to make us fear, but we will not fear. We also should not allow this to make us evil, or lead us to become self-absorbed. As the Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair proclaimed nearly 40 years ago (speaking of events beginning even 60 years prior) may we continue to be “the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.”
(http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Our_Culture/americans.htm)

God Bless America!

Our guess is that P/E can be expected to drop to perhaps below $10 in coming weeks as a sign that Steve Jobs is Apple. If it manages to hold then perhaps there is more substance to this company than we’ve given them credit for. Whatever happens our condolences to Mr. Jobs. We hope him the best.

It was once said that Steve Jobs generated “A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around…” (Bud Tribble working with Jobs in 1981). Unless he manages to pass on his deceptive powers to a disciple Apple should decline and ultimately vanish. However, while we are certainly no experts on the dark arts, it would seem with so many entranced with his spell that the padawan would not have to accomplish quite the feat that Jobs has. So it could happen. The opportunity is coming quickly for another guru to establish dominance. Be on the lookout.