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like the Wiki Cook-book like the Wikipedia?

You're forgetting who you're talking about here. Microsoft is not going to let Open Source go by without trying to apply the three E's to it, too. The question is how long it will be before it happens (Apache just may be principled enough to squeeze it out of them), and how much will they release? Not that anything existing will be exposed, but what product could they build open source into? HMM?

Think of it as their throwing OSS a bone. Apache is more closely-tied with FreeBSD and its business-friendly license, while Microsoft's open-source opponents predictably forget what is not included in this combination: the GPL. Don't forget Covalent in all this, either. They're a company who has built themselves on the BSD License.

Embrace: Open Source
Extend: The number of acceptible Open Source licenses (or players)
Extinguish: The demand for anticapitalist licenses

I guess another question would be what quantity of OSS would MS have to release before antiMicrosoft Slashdot turned away from them?

You're forgetting who you're talking about here. Microsoft is not going to let Open Source go by without trying to apply the three E's to it, too. The question is how long it will be before it happens (Apache just may be principled enough to squeeze it out of them), and how much will they release? Not that anything existing will be exposed, but what product could they build open source into? HMM?

Think of it as their throwing OSS a bone. Apache is more closely-tied with FreeBSD and its business-friendly license, while Microsoft's open-source opponents predictably forget what is not included in this combination: the GPL. Don't forget Covalent in all this, either. They're a company who has built themselves on the BSD License.

Embrace: Open Source
Extend: The number of acceptible Open Source licenses (or players)
Extinguish: The demand for anticapitalist licenses

I guess another question would be what quantity of OSS would MS have to release before antiMicrosoft Slashdot turned away from them?

You're forgetting who you're talking about here. Microsoft is not going to let Open Source go by without trying to apply the three E's to it, too. The question is how long it will be before it happens (Apache just may be principled enough to squeeze it out of them), and how much will they release? Not that anything existing will be exposed, but what product could they build open source into? HMM?

Think of it as their throwing OSS a bone. Apache is more closely-tied with FreeBSD and its business-friendly license, while Microsoft's open-source opponents predictably forget what is not included in this combination: the GPL. Don't forget Covalent in all this, either. They're a company who has built themselves on the BSD License.

Embrace: Open Source
Extend: The number of acceptible Open Source licenses (or players)
Extinguish: The demand for anticapitalist licenses

I guess another question would be what quantity of OSS would MS have to release before antiMicrosoft Slashdot turned away from them?

I was curious, so I did some research on what teh Morris Worm was. (I was 4 at teh time it was released)

All About Morris
Wikipedia
It seems that a college kid wrote a small prgram to propagate itself to as many computers as it could, and try to run in the background unnoticed. But due to a bug(s) it copied itself manytimes over and ran multiple times on teh same machine, causeing to slow to a point of being unusable.

It infected 6,000 VAX machines in November of 1988.

Gotta love Google

while one guy already brought up MPEG, AVI, PNG.

It looks like the patent is FAR more sweeping, as it's on the mere concept of data compression in general. The purpose of compression is the same as stated in the abstract: transfer over limited bandwidth medium. Surely any lawyer is capable of defining a disk drive as a transfer over bandwidth medium. Not to mention that compression algorithms were around long before this patent was filed. Huffman codes came out in 1952. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Huffman+coding

A format, language, or protocol that has become a standard not because it has been approved by a standards organization but because it is widely used and recognized by the industry as being standard.

My only question is Why?

Why waste your time getting linux to run on a Microsuck product?
Why waste time dealing with closed hardware?

Because it's there? :-)
Less flippantly, one of Linux's strong points is the ability to put otherwise wasted hardware to good use. I think that pretty much sums up the X-Box - why cripple a perfectly good PC to use as a game console when there are other purpose-built alternatives?

Remember The Goodies motto: "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime."

After all, just who did Disney pay and ask permission from to use the characters in Mu-Lan, or the Lion King

DisneyCo pirated two movies from Japan. "The Lion King" is "Kimba the White Lion". "Atlantis" is "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water".

or any of the other non-Western cultural figures that they freely profit from?

Actually, some of the Western characters that Disney uses are still under copyright. Take Peter Pan for instance. Peter Pan is still under a limited form of copyright in the United Kingdom and will be forever, or at least until the hospital that owns the copyright goes out of business. No, this isn't Bono Act pseudo-perpetual copyright; it's the real thing. DisneyCo will get a dose of its own medicine when it tries to bring Return to Never Land into DVD Region 2.

The people we are locking up are NOT citizens of the USA.

Even so, the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Amendment 5, and Amendment 6) guarantees rights to "persons", not just to "citizens." From Article 1, Section 9: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." But does this wag-the-dog war on terrorism require such a suspension of habeas corpus?

The people we are locking up are NOT citizens of the USA.

Even so, the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Amendment 5, and Amendment 6) guarantees rights to "persons", not just to "citizens." From Article 1, Section 9: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." But does this wag-the-dog war on terrorism require such a suspension of habeas corpus?

The people we are locking up are NOT citizens of the USA.

Even so, the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Amendment 5, and Amendment 6) guarantees rights to "persons", not just to "citizens." From Article 1, Section 9: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." But does this wag-the-dog war on terrorism require such a suspension of habeas corpus?

Run a cron job to randomly block the entire yahoo domain, so that the users know that yahoo chat works "some" of the time, but not all. Just like windows, in fact. The usage will drop accordingly.

Good idea, and while you're at it, you can track those who use Yahoo and insert purgatives into their coffee, while inserting D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide into coffee of people who didn't use Yahoo in a given day. When the users will find a subconcious correlation with their usage of Yahoo and their happiness, the usage will drop accordingly. This is what we, network administrators, call “conditioning.”

The Wikipedia has extensive discussion on this topic here.

The Wikipedia has extensive discussion on this topic here.

The courts have already ruled on "first sale". Once the publisher sells the copy, they have no say over what you do with it, wether its read it and throw it out, give it away, sell it, burn it, etc.

Arrogant and unrealistic? Of course. Hard to imagine congress criminalizing used book stores! I doubt if anybody at AOL/TW or Disney really envisions achieving such a goal. It's just a legal/political tactic. It's one more case of "lost intellectual property" that they can use as a bargaining chip when things like copyright extension and the precise definition of "fair use" come up for negotiation.

but then [Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Company] lock Mickey Mouse up through their continued efforts to lengthen copyright law

Even in the presence of a potential Bono Act every 20 years, the early Mickey Mouse films have fallen into the public domain because Walt Disney screwed up a copyright notice. Summary of the argument: Back in the 1920s (under the Copyright Act of 1909), a copyright notice was required on the first publication of a work, and "© 1929" wasn't sufficient; it had to be "© 1929 Walt Disney".

Shouldn't Peter Pan have become public domain? I think it's been long enough. Instead every production of Peter Pan pays royalties to an English Children's hospital.

Here's some more information on the perpetual copyright on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. This copyright is subject to compulsory licensing; royalties go to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Disney will get a dose of its own medicine when it tries to release Return to Never Land on DVD in Region 2.

This applies only in the United Kingdom. Such a literal perpetual copyright cannot happen in the United States because of the "limited times" clause in the Constitution, Article I, section 8, clause 8. However, this does not stop Congress from declaring: "Resolved, That it is the policy of the Congress of the United States to enact a twenty (20)-year copyright term extension every twenty (20) years," unless Eldred convinces the Supremes otherwise.

But wouldn't it be easier for someone to buy a playstation rather than go to all this trouble to adapt a gamegear?

For one thing, it isn't a Sega Game Gear but rather a Nintendo Game Boy Advance. (The Game Gear was a portable Master System.)

For another, Game Boy Advance has some exclusive titles (Mario Kart Advance, Pinobee, Golden Sun, etc.) that won't hit the PlayStation for at least 95 years because their publishers own copyrights on the games and will not license a port.

No, I think that the SPA is already as successful as it is ever going to be. And for much the same reasons as are stated in the other follow-up to my previous posting. Moreover I don't think that the music industry would be any more successful than the software industry in this regard.

But success isn't really my point. Sure they'll have declining market share and declining profits if they continue in the same vein; but I don't want to live in a country where that kind of business makes itself at home. It is too scarily close to the Corporate Police State. I can't understand why anyone who so clearly believes in freedom would want to bring about such a dystopian society.

(Background: Mozilla 1.0's main competition in the Windows web browser market is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because of Microsoft's monopoly lock on the PC operating system market, and the company's general greed, some Slashdot users call the company Micro$oft.)

The $ in MS is just getting old

Microsoft's first products were interpreters of the Basic programming language for various computers. In the Basic language, "M$" means "a string variable called M". Consider the use of M$ on Slashdot analogous to the $foo interpolation in the Perl language. (Ignore the fact that Basic doesn't actually do interpolation.)

When one says, "Copyrights do not expire," that's an unambiguous statement of fact. In this case, it's a statement that's completely and utterly false.

No copyright has expired in the last four December 31s, and no copyright will expire in the next sixteen. The Bono Act follows a previous 19-year extension (Copyright Act of 1976). Let me rewrite what I said into what I originally meant:

As long as Congress continues to extend the term of subsisting copyrights, no copyright will ever expire in the United States. Congress shows no intention of deviating from a policy of successive term extensions.

Worse was posting that link to a web page that is so full of vitriol and bile as to be practically useless in any meaningful discussion.

Here's a much less biased link: clicky

Exaggeration for effect is one, and I think that's what this poster was doing.

How is "a 20 year extension every 20 years creates perpetual copyright in effect" an exaggeration?

Sure it is... as long as the author/creator of the information says it's ok to share.

What if the author/creator is dead?

Now what if a playwright states "This play may be performed only by people with 99% or more African blood, even in areas where no African people live. All whites on the stage will be arrested. Oh, and my estate has a perpetual copyright on this play, so even 200 years after I die, my estate will still get 90% of the box office." Is that fair?

Stealing isn't right, irregardless of whatever tertiary issues you care to bring up.

If a composer has been dead for sixty-eight years, and you record his music, from whom are you stealing vt. Taking and carrying away, feloniously; taking without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, stealing the personal goods of another.

Much of the problem here (specifically in relation to the works of George Gershwin and other 1920s composers) relates to excessive copyright duration.

as I watch my Max Headroom episodes in resolutions they can't even dream of

There's a limit as to how much spatial resolution an analog television signal with a specified bandwidth can carry. (This was suggested by Nyquist and proved by Shannon.) An NTSC color signal can carry about 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second, tops.

Or do you get HDTV? I didn't know any station was broadcasting Max Headroom in HDTV. Heck, I didn't even know Max Headroom was produced in HDTV resolution.

Or are you using some sort of non-linear filter to add faux detail to the picture?

In other words, you can prove mathematically whether any specific program will end or not.

Uh, no. You can't.

There are individual cases for which you can make an ad-hoc proof, yes, but there is no general algorithm that, given a computer program (more properly, a Turing machine), tells you if it halts. I'll leave the gory details to Wikipedia .

So what happens if the hacker dies in between?

In that case, tough beans.

United States copyright law, 17 USC 302, provides for a perpetual copyright on all works created on or after January 1, 1978. Currently, it's 150 years (life plus 70), but Congress reserves the right to pass a 20 year copyright term extension every 20 years, and if Eldred loses the Supreme Court case this fall, count on an immediate 1,000 year extension act.

And don't count on being able to talk the heirs into re-licensing the software. In general, heirs tend to be greedier about copyrights than the author was.

noted environmental scientists like Woody Harrelson, Cher, Sting and Bono

By "Bono" do you mean "Bono" from the band U2 or the late "Bono" who sang with Cher and gave Michael Ei$ner everything he wanted?

You don't want her turning into some D&D monkey, but if you're not careful, she ends up playing fricking Wraith.

Umm, I don't think that's what he meant by RPG.

I think he meant Report Program Generator.

What do you mean 'contains a menu program' ?

The menus on a DVD title are written in a nearly Turing-complete programming language. ("Nearly" meaning memory is bounded.)

All these companies have to do is hack the dvd program so that it ignores the 'die' command

Impossible. Detecting an inlined version of the 'die' command reliably on a Turing-complete system will solve the halting problem, which Turing proved undecidable way back in 1936.

Likewise, they can send back any region code they want until the contents are viewable.

This still doesn't solve the problem of not being able to import the player into countries that have passed DMCA, EUCD, or other laws prohibiting such circumvention.

Actually you're right. It was originally named Star Wars but was renamed "Episode IV: A New Hope" when the sequels were picked up. That's also when Lucas had to come up with backstory enough to write two more episodes to follow the original, and the idea for the prequels seems to have sprouted in his knobby little head.

biut it doesn't matter you can STILL buy a n64

You can still buy lots of NES consoles on eBay. Nintendo has long used the existence of eBay against the "preservation" and "but piracy of no-longer-available software is fair use" defences. (I'd give you a link, but it appears to have disappeared in the 2001 redesign.)

emulating the c64 would be a wonderful use of new hardware... emulating the n64 would be piracy

Actually both would be piracy, unless you have specific license contracts that state that you may freely copy and redistribute software for the Commodore 64. Unlike patents, copyrights do not expire.

On the other hand, how did Nintendo 64 software developers develop and test their software? Emulation isn't piracy if you own the copyright on what you're emulating. Even Nintendo has recently realized that that highly substantial non-infringing uses for flash cartridges make the flash cartridges in and of themselves no longer illegal, and has removed the "emulators exist ONLY to play pirated games" language from its IP FAQ.

"Army of aboot Eight"...

Actually, the Canadian pronunciation of "about" is closer to "a boat" than "a boot". (Read More...)

Yes, Apple sued Apple, but not in the way you think.

Apple Records, the Beatles' record company, sued Apple Computer over the name. If I remember right, both Apples settled out of court. The agreement basically said that Apple Computer would keep the name "Apple Computer" and that Apple Computer would never get into the music recording business.

This is, by the way, the origin of the system sound on Macs called "Sosumi". Apple Records was not happy when Apple Computer started adding all kinds of sound capabilities to Macs, which Apple Records thought may violate the agreement. Ergo the cheeky name for the sound -- "so sue me".

cf. Wikipedia

Cheers,

Ethelred

People are going to learn what they needed to learn. Let them contribute to the material, in someplace where everyone can follow.

The World Wide Web was supposed to be writable; there are (at least) a couple of ways to make it so. One is to set up a Faq-o-matic (see also here); it lets people post questions and their answers. Another is to install a Wiki (link to the definitive book on the subject, proceeds help support the original Wiki). A Wiki is hard to describe; it's kind of a mix between a Web site and a graffiti wall. There are dozens of implementations and hundreds of installations; for example, here is one trying to build a (GFDL-licensed) online encyclopedia (and here is a page describing how to add to or modify the content there).

These aren't complete solutions, but they should provide good supplements.

People are going to learn what they needed to learn. Let them contribute to the material, in someplace where everyone can follow.

The World Wide Web was supposed to be writable; there are (at least) a couple of ways to make it so. One is to set up a Faq-o-matic (see also here); it lets people post questions and their answers. Another is to install a Wiki (link to the definitive book on the subject, proceeds help support the original Wiki). A Wiki is hard to describe; it's kind of a mix between a Web site and a graffiti wall. There are dozens of implementations and hundreds of installations; for example, here is one trying to build a (GFDL-licensed) online encyclopedia (and here is a page describing how to add to or modify the content there).

These aren't complete solutions, but they should provide good supplements.

You are aware the "Nuclear Family [columbia.edu]" has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, right?

You are aware the word "pun" has nothing to do with such witty retort, right?

slashdot.org shouldn't be a .org. It's quite clear now that it is a commercial enterprise and while they should keep the .org they'd better default their pages to the .com.

Not that these root mean anything but it would be clearer if they did. That's the reason why the wikipedia (for example) chose .com suffix even if it is currently a purely noncommercial enterprise.

It's not only links in the Internet that are distributed according to a power law, it`s rather a pattern that turns up in many domains. One example is Zipf's law for all kinds of linguistic data, and...much more, although I can't think of an example at the moment ;-)

Another reason to reconsider all-night cramming (with or without pharmacological assistance) is the possible role of sleep in memory consolidation.

Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out? There goes your "free speech"... q.e.d.

The really funny thing is that this is all documented very well in any number of books at your local public library, like The Running Man (for the crashing) and various other true and fictional books to describe how to do the hijacking itself. The average American has seen plenty of movies that involve airplane hijackings; figuring out how to do it yourself (note: this is not something I'm advocating here) would not be that difficult. Especially if you don't even use guns to do it.

In the U.S. you can still buy The Anarchist's Cookbook even! But you may have to go to court to defend that right, just like xs4all is in this case. So there is no absolute freedom of speech without at least the money to back it up.

I think you're referring to ECMAScript formerly called JavaScript

First it was LiveScript, then when "Java" became a buzzword, Netscape changed its syntax to resemble that of a brace language (C, Perl, or the Java programming language) and changed its name to JavaScript. "ECMAScript" is the generic name, created when the underlying language (without any specific DOM) was submitted to the European standards body ECMA; "JavaScript" is Sun's trademark licensed to Netscape, reflected in the media type for ECMAScript source code (text/javascript).

I can factor 1024-bit primes easily. Each has two factors -- itself and 1.

To "factor a prime" means to prove that it is, in fact, a prime number in N and not something strange like a Carmichael number or something.

Since I don't code, I do thought experiments. Lately, they've been about "turnkey" operations large enough for thousands. I imagine thought experiments of this sort as as common as hemeroids. Anyone else into Douglas Hofstadter's "Alternative State of the Union"?

Mozilla has been my browser of choice for a while now, but it still has some serious bugs. So consider this criticism based in love. It's also encouraging that all these bugs have a real chance of being fixed. Even I could theoretically fix them.

There is a huge bug with bookmarks:

51683: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.

This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.

Another, less serious bookmark bug:
85469: Bookmark select/cut/paste operation is sensitive to order of selection

This is a major meta-bug:
73812: Browser doesn't fit with Mac OS X UI Specs

Anyone who uses a Mac uses it because of the user interface--having a program that doesn't comply with the guidelines is extraordinarily frustrating. But they're definitely getting closer.

128658: Typing in textarea really slow

Large textareas overwhelm Mozilla. This makes editing in WP, for example, very frustrating. Totally unacceptable.

However, it's great watching bugs get steadily fixed. So vote for the above bugs, get them fixed, submit patches, hooray. The rendering engine really is marvelous.

Harvest us? This sounds like a B-Movie script

Grandparent could just be thinking 800,699 years ahead to the time of Precious Moments people and albino lemur-morphs.

By the way, GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital) owns a perpetual copyright on James M. Barrie's Peter Pan works. No, it's not a 95-year copyright or a life+70 copyright. It's a perpetual copyright, recognized by the Berne treaty. (Read More...) When Disney brings Peter Pan II to Region 2 (where European copyrights are more strictly enforced), GOSH is going to make a wad of dough on royalties, giving Disney a taste of its own medicine.

By the way, GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital) owns a perpetual copyright on James M. Barrie's Peter Pan works. No, it's not a 95-year copyright or a life+70 copyright. It's a perpetual copyright, recognized by the Berne treaty. (Read More...) When Disney brings Peter Pan II to Region 2 (where European copyrights are more strictly enforced), GOSH is going to make a wad of dough on royalties, giving Disney a taste of its own medicine.

All in all, apart from the obvious rhetoric point for democracy being served by the collaborative organization of information (which is valid), other advantages of blogs and wikis include the formation of communities revolving around areas of interest, and positive contributions to the 'information tag' game (trying to keep up with the news), especially where technology is involved.
Of course, they can never totally supplant central information dispensation efforts (news agencies, zines and portals), but they don't have to: they are designed to supplement such efforts and provide a modicum of control and feedback by the public.

For example, if you know what to listen for (hard 'edges' to notes on vocals) you can hear it all over Britney's music. It's also being used as a vocoder-type effect (synth filtered by voice) on some recordings. The song on Kid Rock's hit CD that he sang on (it was country sounding) used it extensively.

• Cher - Believe (but boycott Cher because she supports perpetual copyright)
• Kid Rock - Only God Knows Why (country-ish rock)
• Eiffel 65 - Blue (the song rumored to be about homosexuality: "I'm in need of a guy, I'm in need of a guy")

However, use of the vocoder on some other songs is more subtle. Sometimes, the vocoder's pitch is set halfway between the pitch the slut is actually singing and the pitch that her producers want her to sing, which produces a much less synthetic perception. (Following a single voice's pitch is straightforward: square-root the signal to restore the fundamental, apply a 4th order low pass filter to remove harmonics, and count sign changes. If you want to know more, mail me.)

Oops! I did it again. I just described how to do something that probably infringes a dozen patents worldwide.