My friend Kerry Howley has a fantastic piece on the bizarre state of the law regarding ownership of human body parts. Self-annointed “bioethicists” claim that we can’t give people the right to control what happens to their own body parts, because that could lead to a world in which body parts “become nothing more than chattel going to the highest bidder.”
And that would be bad because… well, it’s not clear why. Certainly, the research community hasn’t been shy about using their control over patients’ tissues to enrich themselves:
In the end, disputes of this kind always come back to John Moore’s million dollar spleen. Twenty years ago, UCLA School of Medicine Dr. David Golde told Moore his leukemia-ravaged spleen would have to go, and Moore agreed to have surgeons remove the organ. For years afterward, Moore would fly from his home in Seattle to UCLA, where Golde would check on his progress and take samples of sperm, blood, and bone marrow aspirate.
Unbeknownst to Moore, his supposedly trashed spleen was teeming with biomedical treasure. Golde derived a commercial cell line from the disembodied organ, and proceeded to patent it. Eventually, Moore became suspicious at the steady stream of vague release forms he was being asked to sign. He investigated, caught Golde, and sued. In 1990, a California court ruled that Moore had no proprietary right to the blood and tissue taken from his body. By that time, Golde had sold the patent for $2 million.
So apparently, it’s ethical to make large profits from human body parts, but
only if the patient who provided the body parts doesn’t get a penny of it. Sounds ethical to me.
Kerry’s article is worth reading in full.
Anybody know why eMusic’s traffic has tripled in the last month?
It seems that the Technical Guidelines Development Committee has accepted the NIST recommendations against e-voting after all. As a compromise, the new guidelines apparently emphasize that existing voting machines are grandfathered in.
This strikes me as a reasonable compromise. Obviously, I’d like to see us scrap paperless voting machines for the 2008 election, but there is likely to be substantial political resistance to that idea. Since TGDC doesn’t have the authority to ban paperless voting in any event, the important thing is that they come out with a strong statement that machines without paper trails are insecure. That will give the good guys in individual states the ammunition they need to accelerate the process of phasing out insecure machines.
I want to put a bit of meat on the bones of my previous post about ads and content by sketching out a hypothetical future YouTube product that could make Google a big pile of money. This also relates to the discussion Jerry and I had about whether the Internet will kill broadcast TV.
People in the future are not going to want to watch TV at their desks. Couches will be as comfortable as they are today. So imagine Google sells a $99 “YouTube TV” set-top box that plugs into an ethernet jack and streams video from the Internet. It would probably look something like Apple’s forthcoming iTV set-top box.
You would have a YouTube account, and you’d have a variety of ways to select content that you want to watch. you could subscribe to a television show or video podcast (which will likely be one and the same), so that each week’s episode automatically appeared in your queue. As you were browsing the web at work, there’d be a little button at the bottom of every YouTube video (including embedded ones) allowing you to place a video in her queue for later viewing. The system might use collaborative filtering to suggest new programs you to watch, as TiVo does today. You might also give certain friends permission to add videos to your queue.
When you sat down on the couch and turned on your YouTube box, it would automatically start playing the first program in your queue. The remote would have three buttons that were green, yellow, and red. Pushing the yellow button would signal to the machine “this looks interesting but I don’t want to watch it now. That would put it back in the queue for viewing at a later time. The red button would say “This sucks. Never show it to me again.”
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Matt Yglesias wonders how YouTube is going to turn a profit:
To actually turn all those viewers into money, you need to sell ads. But it’s hard to sell ads on YouTube. For one thing, lots of YouTube streams don’t even come through the YouTube site. For another thing, there are lots of other sites that also do video hosting, so if YouTube gets all ad-heavy, people may switch away to other services…
To me, at least, this is the real moral of the story. Peer-production of digital media probably will produce a fair quantity of awesome popular stuff lurking amidst the vast pool of dreck. And well-designed services will let the awesome stuff rise to the top and the dreck fade to the background, rendering those services awesome and popular. But–and here’s the rub–having something awesome and popular just may not prove to be especially lucrative. In the past, a popular television show or a popular album or a popular film or a popular distribution channel guaranteed you vast sums of money. In the future, that just may not be the case. The very most popular things will generate some income, enough to live off of and continue financing new projects, but not the sort of gigantic windfalls associated with 20th century media hits. And lots of other things–including reasonably popular ones–will only generate trivial levels of income. And they’ll continue to be made. Made by people who think its fun, or who derive some benefit from their work other than direct monetary income.
To some extent this is clearly true: it’s harder to monetize your content when there’s more competition. But I think Matt underestimates the profit-making potential of category-leading websites. Matt’s commenters correctly point out that you could have made the same argument about Google itself, which in 2000 was a fantastic search engine without a business model to speak of. Then they figured out how to make money on ads, and now they’re a publicly traded company worth a hundred billion dollars. This is quite correct, but I think there’s more to be said about
why Google’s ads have been so lucrative.
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I knew it couldn’t be that easy. The TGDC rejected NIST’s proposal (which I discussed on Friday) to decertify paperless e-voting machines after they couldn’t get the 8 votes they needed to approve it:
Committee member Brit Williams, a computer scientist who has conducted certification evaluations of Georgia’s paperless electronic voting system, opposed the measure. “You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware,” he said.
Mike Masnick points out how ridiculous this is:
Why yes. Yes we are. That’s because the entire voting system hardware is totally screwed up. So, to be more specific, we’re talking about stopping an e-voting program that has serious problems and has raised plenty of legitimate questions about just how fair and accurate our elections are. That seems like a perfectly valid reason that shouldn’t be tossed aside just because it’ll be a lot of work. We also thought that democracy itself was supposed to be hard work, but apparently some of those on the Technical Guidelines Committee disagree.
The Seattle Times has a fascinating article that nicely illustrates the inefficiencies of central planning:
It’s worth noting just how complex Vista became. BusinessWeek estimates it took 10,000 employees about five years to ship Vista.
In an interview with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer a few weeks ago, I asked if he had added up how much money it cost to develop Vista. He laughed, “I can’t say I have. It would be impossible to count up. … I’m sure it’s a lot.”
If we assume Microsoft’s costs per employee are about $200,000 a year, the estimated payroll costs alone for Vista hover around $10 billion. That has to be close to the costs of some of the biggest engineering projects ever undertaken, such as the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb during World War II. And while Microsoft toiled on Vista, its stock price stayed flat.
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Via Patri Friedman, here’s a video of a very interesting talk Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gave at Google:
It gives a nice overview of the current state of the Ubuntu community. He makes it clear that emphasis in free software discussions on “community” is not just a rhetorical flourish. His team spends an enormous amount of time and effort communicating and coordinating with the hundreds of different projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution.
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Ed Felten reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a draft of a report to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee recommending that the next iteration of its voting machine standards not permit the certification of paperless DREs. Given the speed at which the wheels of bureaucracy turn, it appears that would mean that no new paperless voting machines would be certified after the 2008 election. Existing DREs might be grandfathered in for the 2008 election and beyond.
This is great news. As Felten notes, the report recommends against certification of paperless DREs in clear and unambiguous language. It’s particularly important because if a recommendation like this is adopted by an official standards-setting agency of the federal government, it will be awfully hard for the Diebolds of world to demonize the source, as they’ve done with previous critics.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.